


Shadow In the Stars

by JoAsakura



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-11
Updated: 2012-10-15
Packaged: 2017-11-16 02:55:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 32
Words: 39,619
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/534699
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JoAsakura/pseuds/JoAsakura
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mass Effect meets gritty noir/pulp fiction. The first human SPECTRE is disgraced and presumed dead, but his husband and fellow SPECTRE, Kaidan Alenko, has reason to believe otherwise. Soon, Kaidan finds himself in a desperate race to locate John Shepard before their enemies do - and discover the secret in his head that could tear the fragile civilization on the Citadel apart.</p><p>Illustrations provided by the amazing <a href="http://alishatorn.tumblr.com/post/33639984404/art-masterpost-shadow-in-the-stars-based-on-and">alishatorn </a></p><p>MASS EFFECT BIG BANG 2012</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

__

_The government calls it the Citadel. A five-pronged crown seated in the heart of a glowing nebula. The brightest jewel amongst the stars.  
_

**_We_ ** _just call it home. A lonely, forgotten hunk of space junk. A collection of crumbling, messed up wards with bad atmo, dodgy architecture and seedy officials all desperately reaching for that brass ring of privilege and power called the Presidium._

_And all of it protected by an elite force, the left hand of the Council, if the cops and judges are the right. A force that does whatever it takes to keep the peace. Special Tactics and Recon: The SPECTREs._

_Mostly turians and asari in the Presidium, the real force on the Council.  But every species has a delegate. Even humans, though we barely rate as high as the Junkers or the bugs who keep the temples clean. They call the children of our poorest "duct rats" and say we all belong in the waste with the rest of the vermin._

_If you believe the tripe you read in the history pads, our ancestors found their way here, under the aegis of the goddess Athame who uplifted us - saved us from monsters in the dark places between the stars. That we once had ships that sailed between those stars, not just hops between ruined chunks of space rock and farm satellites. That we once had homeworlds called Thessia or Palaven or Earth.  
_

_Homeworlds swallowed and long lost by the darkness.  
_

_You'd be hard pressed to find a soul that believes in those worlds these days. From the Asari Grand Hierophant all the way down to the Junkers... the quarians in their lifesuits that scuttle like pyjak through what's officially called the Ring. We just call it the Graveyard - an impassable wall, millions of miles all the way around, of derelict starships and planetary rubble that chokes the nebula the Citadel sits in.  
_

_If those worlds really exist, they've long since forgotten about us.  
_

_And we've long since forgotten the way back.  
_

_There's only three kinds of people who go out to the Graveyard. Junkers, crooks and SPECTREs. For the SPECTREs, it's a stupid challenge, a test when things are quiet. They dump your sorry ass out on the Leviathan - the oldest, biggest, most terrifying thing you've ever seen in your life - and see how long you can go before you're begging for evac.  
_

_For a long time, the record went to my boss, a hardass turian named Saren Arterius. More than a decade before I was hired, he went for three days, forty-two minutes, seventeen seconds. Mainly because that's when he ran out of ammo, putting down the ghosts that haunt the place - husks left behind of whatever fools didn't make it out in the past.  
_

_The record was broken five years ago by the first human to complete the SPECTRE program. Five days, eighteen hours, twelve minutes and nine seconds.  
_

_John Shepard, a duct rat from Zakera Ward.  
_

_The first human SPECTRE... and my husband.  
_

_My name is Kaidan Alenko, the second human SPECTRE. And I hope to whatever gods are left in this universe that I find him before the others do._

~~

Kaidan sat back in the plush chair in his living room. Massive windows opened out to the Presidium, and cherry blossoms drifted in from the trees on the patio. The sky this week was the work of a noted asari artist, and the twilight clouds were lush and golden against a rose-violet sky.

You couldn't see the wards from here, just the near-silent passage of aircabs past his window, and the buildings across the river, lit by the glorious display of the sky.

He knocked back a swig of whiskey and turned Shepard's SPECTRE badge over in his fingers, scowling. He hadn't bothered to change on his return from HQ, and his tie was half-done. The fine, dark pinstripe suit that cost a month's rent in the Zakera Midcity was a rumpled mess, matching the stubble on his jaw.

"Major Alenko, Doctor T'soni is here to see you," The VI that managed his schedule said in its tinny little voice, shaking Kaidan out of grim thoughts.

"Send her in, Bob."  Kaidan pushed out of his seat, letting the badge clatter to the glassy tabletop. "Liara. Thanks for coming."

She was small for an asari, faintly-scaled blue skin iridescent in the twilight. Tiny and fragile, and one of the toughest, smartest people Kaidan had ever had the pleasure of meeting. "Kaidan, this... anniversary... it's more important than any university work." She said, hugging him close. "I... it hardly seems like he's been gone for two years. Are you going to mark it at the Temple?"

"Thanks, Liara." He hugged her back. "Probably not. I don't feel like dealing with the media this year. Come on into the kitchen. I'll get you a drink," Kaidan finished, passing his hand over a switch as she followed him in.

"Security protocols engaged, Major," Bob chirped. "Silent running."

"Thanks, Bob." Kaidan hopped up on the counter and poured two more drinks. "So. How's my favourite information broker slash archaeologist?"

Liara leaned back and took a glass from him. "I come bearing gifts, if that's what you're wondering." She smiled over the rim of the glass. "It hasn't been easy, though, Kaidan."

"I know. And I wouldn't have asked..."

"If you hadn't been certain that Saren was lying about the Eden Prime incident." She finished. "And dedicated enough to continue investigating it. I know... I know it must be hard on you, still serving with Saren."

"Liara." Kaidan stared at his drink. "Shepard's not... I would... _Goddess_ , Liara, he would NEVER have done what they said," he said firmly.

"And I believe you. I've had my people combing records since it happened. There aren't any from that satellite, Kaidan. No feeds except the ones that came from Saren's armour. No feeds at all from Nihlus Kryik's suit. All of Shepard's are gone too, even beyond my abilities to track. But I don't believe he was a terrorist any more than you do. I don't believe he went insane and killed all those researchers and his partner as well. I agree that Saren is hiding something." Liara paused. "And if nothing else... Well... I owe this to you both."

She reached over and refilled her glass before Kaidan could. "I've been having one of my assistants break down the vid feed you pulled from the archives. She's a human girl named Traynor, best I've ever seen." She ran her finger over the rim with a little smile. "It's taken her more than a year, Kaidan, but she's onto something.  The scenes of Shepard killing the researchers? She's certain they were doctored in real time through an incredibly sophisticated substitution VI. He's definitely killing _something_ , but it's not an asari or human. She still hasn't been able to break the data up enough yet to figure out what, though."

Those images had been on every news station on the Citadel. The first human SPECTRE gone berserk, tearing apart an archeological research station on a nearby planetoid they'd ironically named "Eden Prime" for the age of the massive artefacts discovered beneath its surface.

Kaidan clunked his head against a cabinet. "So, we still can't prove anything definitively."  Faint blue light crackled around his hand and the sound of snapping glass was loud in the silence of the room.

"There's more," Liara said, calmly watching Kaidan dump the broken glass in the disposal. "There's been rumours from some of my informants. No vids or stills yet, but there's been talk of a madman. A prophet, if you will, on Omega. And from the descriptions... it sounds like some of the strange things Shepard was saying before he was sent to Eden Prime."

Kaidan blinked at her. "Omega." There was a sound in his ears and at first he thought someone was pounding on his door. Then he realised it was his heart. "Shepard could be alive? On Omega," he said again, stupidly. "Shepard... could be alive."

It made sense, Kaidan thought. Deep in the heart of the Graveyard, a lawless frontier at the edges of the Citadel's reach. If Shepard _were_ alive, he was smart enough to know Omega would be the safest place to be. What had seemed hopeless a moment ago was now something else entirely, and Kaidan's mind was racing. "Omega. I have to get to Omega," he said, repeating the name like a charm as he paced across the room, not even seeing Liara for several minutes.

Finally, he calmed himself and wiped the blood off his hand, taking a deep breath. "I don't know my way around there very well. But I know someone who does."


	2. Chapter 2

_I met John Shepard at the Temple when I was thirteen. I was two years in on my Sentinel's Path and he was little better than an animal.  
_

_Before that, I was a lucky one. My father a commander in C-Sec, my mother a diplomatic aide. We had a comfortable home on one of the lower sections of the Presidium, overlooking a small bay. It was a good life.  
_

_When I was eleven, my powers kicked in, and my parents could only watch as two C-Sec soldiers dragged me off for training. By law, biotics are regulated by the government. Except the asari, because every one of them is biotic to some degree, and they have a whole culture about it. And because they do, the rest of us do, too.  
_

_I mean... hell; I grew up watching the "Adventures of Tela Vasir and Her Biotic Friends" on Saturday morning like every other kid. Everyone knew the asari were *supposed* to be biotic.  
_

_When the rest of us are just freaks.  
_

_It's rare, but when the powers manifest in other species, the results can be dangerous, unpredictable. They tell you they're putting you in the Temple of Temperance for the good of your loved ones, and you believe them, even when your friends are dying around you. They put chips in your brains and an amp at the base of your skull to make it easier to control the power, and then remind you that the cybernetics only make you more alien. Remind you that the Temple is your saving grace.  
_

_What can I say about the Temple? I mean **the**_ _Temple - with an uppercase "T" - not the satellite ones in every ward, or the turian spirit shrines or those dumps the hippies in the siarist cults use. Athame's Grand Temple of Temperance.  
_

_It sits on a pier that juts out in the middle of the Presidium Ring. A tower, almost two_ _kilometres_ _in height. One way in, one way out, through the Bridge.  Objectively? It's beautiful.  
_

_Glass-walled forests that look out into the nebula,_ _spiralling_ _staircases rimmed with flowering trees.  The lower courtyard where the Hierophant says the monthly prayers and big, important council announcements are made amongst the gardens. Even the classrooms have a peaceful feel about them. And everywhere you look, statues of Athame looking down with her gentle smile, reminding us to be our better selves. Even when your better self is spitting blood on the floor because you couldn't figure out how to put up your barriers.  
_

_I was a good kid there, didn't make waves, just wanted to do my time, complete the Path I'd been set on, get my license and get back into the world. No hope, really. No desire. Just counting days like a calendar app.  
_

_That all changed with the duct rat.  
_

_Shepard was ten when they brought him in, skinny and filthy and bleeding *almost* as badly as the turian officer dragging him behind by the restraints on his wrists. Shepard had put the guy's partner in the hospital and he was actually growling when they dumped him in the foyer to the dismay of the Matriarch at intake.  
_

_He'd had a biotic flare during some sort of gang fight down in the bowels of Zakera Ward, busted up a section of the Undercity, and nearly killed a turian cop in his escape attempt.  
_

_He had eyes bluer than any asari's, blue as a clear Presidium sky, and I think I fell in love with him from the first moment I saw him.  
_

_~~_

Kaidan sighed as he stepped out of the aircab, turning his collar up against the chill. Unlike the higher levels of the wards or the Presidium itself, where the more fortunate lived in climate-control, the mid levels were cold and damp, regular rains from the constant clash of conflicting atmo pockets. 

It beaded on the shoulders of his deep blue coat, and dripped from the rim of the fedora slung low over his eyes. It was noisy and crowded and it never, ever stopped. They'd lived here once, and he didn't miss it one bit. 

He looked out from the taxi platform at the ward around him, the purple glow of the nebula casting the whole of the city in a perpetual twilight where it broke through the clouds. Air traffic zipped past as pedestrians navigated the suspended pedways. Biometric ads chattered constantly, and the air was full of scents - the funk of thousands of people passing by, food simmering in nearby restaurants and the constant, sickly odour wafting up from the food processing factories Downcity. 

Below Downcity was the Undercity, where people scraped out existence in the massive system of ducts and tunnels that ran through the foundations of each of the wards. Down there, the people lived packed in warrens. There were only artificial lights and the constant drone of the Citadel's life support systems. Everything smelled sour and old. 

Kaidan had been in Zakera's Undercity only once, right after his appointment. They were chasing a salarian drug dealer with a cargo of hallex cut with industrial fertiliser and a string of dead bodies in his wake.  The bastard had the Downcity C-Sec outpost in his pocket, and Kaidan remembered it had only been kicked to the SPECTREs after a representative's daughter had gotten a hit of the stuff and dropped dead at some important function. 

It had been oppressively hot, nothing but walls and flickering neon as far as the eye could see. But Shepard had been by his side, and navigated the maze of alleys as if he'd never left. They'd killed the dealer and his band of hired muscle in a warehouse, and made love in a filthy hotel nearby, sirens wailing in the distance. 

Kaidan reached into his pocket and squeezed Shepard's SPECTRE badge until his fingers ached, stepping into the flow of foot traffic until he reached _The Dark Star.  
_

The cab ride had taken forever, half the Ward's tunnels and pedways shut down for repairs or construction. Whole residential blocks were being diverted around - in fact, the wards in general were a mess of black and yellow holosigns, flickering in the perpetual gloom. An overly-chipper VI of an asari in a Municipal Works uniform directed the flow of traffic around the barriers, occasionally blowing a kiss to passersby. 

He'd never been particularly interested in the Citadel's public works, and the Presidium never seemed to be caught up in the constant muddle of municipal repairs. But it was definitely worse since he and Shepard had lived in their little flat.

At a news and entertainment kiosk, a reporter on one of the slew of chattering screens was talking about Shepard, and Kaidan's stomach sank, just a little. Two years, and they were still going on about the Butcher of Eden Prime. Then, worse, one of their wedding photos flickered up.

It didn't take much of a biotic push to make the vidscreen shatter, and Kaidan tugged his hat further down, making his way back into the pedestrian traffic. He didn't look up again until he was at the entrance to the bar.

The music was relentless, pounding bass shaking the pavement outside where a volus in a decrepit pressure suit handed out flyers with exotic dancers on them. "Come to Chora's Den," it hissed through the speech emulators. "Nice clean human girls... or boys. Not like this dump."

Kaidan shoved past it, targeted vid-ads stuttering and skipping before flickering dead as he strode in. ( After all, one of the perks of being a supralegal agent of the Council was that your biometrics were wiped from the public record.)

He hated places like this, but Shepard had loved them. He danced like a vorcha high off its ass on creeper, and drank too much. But he always dragged Kaidan out onto the dance floor to join him in making fools of themselves, and as long as Shepard's body was pressed against his, he didn't mind if people stared at them, dancing like idiots.

Inside, a lousy band was enthusiastically playing vaguely off-key covers of the top ten hits of the week, protected behind a cheap metal grate. It smelled like old beer and vomit, and the dance floor was choked with patrons flailing like drunken fools.

Kaidan sighed. (Yep. Shepard would have _loved_ this place.) 

He pushed his way through the crowd and leaned against the bar. The bartender was a turian kid, probably too young to be legally slinging batarian ale if the smooth surface of his crest was any indicator, orange facepaint glowing faintly in the flashing lights. "Hey." Kaidan flagged him over. "I'm looking for a turian, blue paint, scars. Drinks here sometimes." 

The kid's mandibles twitched as he polished a glass. "There's a dextro whorehouse two blocks down. Make sure you bring antihistamines, you hairy creep." 

Kaidan's biotics flared, slamming the bartender's face down onto the pitted metal bar. He didn't have to look to know that everyone was staring at him, so he leaned forward and hissed. "I'm looking for Archangel, you little prick, and if you make me ask again..."

"Spirits, ok, ok." The kid flailed. Kaidan released him, and the bartender tapped out an address on the cheap omnitool at his wrist. "Here. I've heard he goes to this joint when he's not here. Take it and get out of my bar, asshole." 

Kaidan looked at the address and sighed. (Great. Undercity.) "Thanks for your time." He slapped a credit chit down on the bar. 

"I know who you are, SPECTRE." The bartender, emboldened by Kaidan's retreating back, shouted. "And I know your mate's the fuckin' Butcher of Eden Prime. Don't you come back here again, y'hear?" 

Kaidan didn't bother to turn back as the shockwave kicked up behind him. The sound system shrieked and died amidst a chorus of snapping metal and breaking glass and angry, angry shouts. 

Out in the rain, he looked down at the volus and took a flyer. "Thanks. I think I'll check out Chora's after all."


	3. Chapter 3

_I was seventeen the first time I kissed him.  
_

_We'd skirted around it like the dumb kids we were. Passing notes between friends, holding hands when the Proctors weren't looking. We weren't even on the same Paths, Vanguard and Sentinel. Had no reason to even know each other's names. But I'd been fascinated with him the moment they'd brought him in, and when our eyes met in the Temple's foyer?  
_

_Turned out, he'd latched on to me as well.  
_

_The little animal they'd brought in four years ago had changed. Not only the growth spurt that had left him taller and broader than any other kid in his age, but left him handsome, confident.  
_

_He had this way about him. Cocky grin on full lips that made you want to smack him and kiss him all at once. Grin that turned fierce and grim when he thought there was something wrong, something unfair going on. He stood up for the weaker children like some guardian angel, took a stand against the instructors when no one else felt they could.  
_

_I might've been older, but all it took was those perfect blue eyes and that cocky grin to tell me that even if Shepard had latched on to me, I'd follow him anywhere he wanted to go.  
_

_Even if that meant a supply closet after lights out, stinking of industrial detergent. The closet was designed for the keepers, the bug-like creatures who maintained the Temple, too low for us to stand. We_ _squirreled_ _away forbidden treasures, like a bootleg Blasto flick or the latest issue of Armoured Turian Gardress. Sometimes, it was the two of us just holding each other in our secret spot behind the cleaning bots.  
_

_Rhana, my suitemate, covered for us when she could. She was a nice girl. The kind of girl you wanted to bring home to your parents and say you were marrying her. The Proctors tried to pair us up like that, two smart, well behaved biotic kids, maybe have smart, well behaved biotic babies. Trackable bloodlines.  
_

_But she knew. She always knew.  
_

_And that night, huddled in the supply closet, I cleaned Shepard's bleeding face and gently pressed a cold cloth to his swollen eye. I didn't want to sit in this closet reading contraband comic books or vids. I just wanted to make everything right.  
_

_Shepard had stood up to Vyrnnus, the newest Proctor, tried to get him to lay off a bunch of smaller kids. A turian with a face like a drawer full of knives and a hatred of humans that went on for miles, Vyrnnus didn't take kindly to a duct rat talking back to him.  
_

_I didn't hear about the black eye, the broken nose, the rest of it until after evening assembly. And then only because Shepard had refused to go to the medical bay, wearing the blood crusted on his face like a turian wears their paint.  
_

_Afterwards, we curled together in our little janitorial palace, ignoring the purloined snacks and entertainment hidden in the air vent and I couldn't hold back. I kissed the gash on his nose, and the cut on his lip. I kissed the blackened flesh around his beautiful blue eyes.  
_

_And he kissed me back, all the defiance he'd shown against our instructor drained from him.  He shook in my arms like a scared kid and I held him as tightly as I dared. One of us said "I love you."  
_

_And to this day, I don't know which one of us said it first.  
_

_John Shepard, duct rat and apprentice Vanguard, made me believe in justice and bravery, when all I'd seen was emptiness before. And afterwards, he said I'd made him believe in hope and love, when all he'd seen was a prison.  
_

_We were stupid kids, far too young for anything, but I asked him to marry me that very night.  
_

_He said yes._

~~

No aircabs or rapid transit ran to the Undercity. It was the tube all the way. Train cars packed with people of all species. Well-bred asari maidens looking for a thrill in the "dirty down," washed up turian soldiers drinking cheap dextromalt from bottles half-hidden in paper sacks. There was a vorcha muttering to itself at the end of the car, stinking of acid sweat, and a krogan twice Kaidan's size, drunk and looking for a fight.

Humans, too, lots of them. And he knew he stood out. Not just because of the expensive clothes, either. Kaidan had never had Shepard's sheer presence. Crowds didn't part for him as people stared.

But he stood tall, with a Sentinel's stillness in a stooped sea of misery. Still enough that the press of bodies tried as one to keep away from him. They knew he didn't belong, a decidedly foreign body in their little ecosystem, and that made them afraid.

The train swayed as the tube carried it through Downcity, past fifty stops "closed for repairs" that travellers would have to make their way back to on foot, and Kaidan felt a bump against him. A flash of motion from the stillness and he caught a slender wrist.

A quarian girl, tiny in her lifesuit, tried to pull away, and failed. "Bosh'tet." She cursed, turning to look at the object in her hand.

"Wrong pocket for my wallet, little one." Kaidan said, gently taking Shepard's badge back from her. He ran his thumb along its edges, then repocketed it. "And you shouldn't steal."

"Can't blame a Junker for trying?" she asked, as the train car creaked to its last stop. "You certainly don't look like a local. Need a guide?

"You're awfully far from the Ju... the quarian fleet, kid." Kaidan said, striding out onto the platform. She scrambled after him through the noisy, shuffling throng. It was crowded with static signs, dumb vids, and kiosks of hand food and cheap bootleg movies. "Shouldn't you be out in the Ring?"

His stomach turned as he shouldered past an elderly krogan selling pyjak on a stick, dripping with some sort of creamed cloaca paste, swatting at the flies that gathered nearby. She was briskly haggling with a couple of raggedy drell while a nearby turian sold surplus dextro-protein paste to some Junkers.  The smell was, overall, revolting. But Kaidan could see business was brisk.

"Name's Tali'Zorah. And I'm on my pilgrimage." She trotted behind him. "They kick us out so we can see the sights, experience life, that sort of thing, before going back to the Graveyard."

"Well, Tali'Zorah." Kaidan stopped short and she ploughed into his back. "If you're familiar with the dirty down, I need to find this address." He held up the flyer the volus had given him, dancers writhing across its surface.

"Ugh. That place. It's a dump. You sure you want to go THERE?" she asked, and Kaidan pressed a credit chit into her hands.

"I'm sure. And another twenty when we get there," he said after she looked at the chit and squeaked.

"No problem. I'm your girl, SPECTRE." She gave him a sloppy salute and Kaidan frowned.

"Just call me Kaidan."

 


	4. Chapter 4

_If there was going to be a riot, Shepard was going to be at the centre of it.  
_

_Sometimes in the wards, the atmo would go all violent and a storm would roll across the Citadel's arms.  
_

_I'd never seen it in person, just vids of lightning, clouds swallowing up the buildings and thunder so loud you could almost hear it in the Presidium Ring.  
_

_That was what Shepard was like when he was angry, and Vyrnnus, that knife-faced bastard, was the one that started it all.  
_

_The details you need to know are this. A broken arm, a beaten girl. Shepard putting himself between her and a very bad man.  Shepard had attacked him back, drew to himself the blows meant for Rhana. Blows that would have killed her. That nearly killed him as he and the Proctor battled it out.  
_

_The Temple erupted into a riot like there had never been. The Proctors and the Matriarchs in their stiff, starched robes and their words of wisdom couldn't stem the tide of angry children rising up.  
_

_Shepard put forth a call to arms, and turian and human and volus, and every single person that the new Proctor and his assistants had terrorised with their "training", rose up behind him.  
_

 

__

_art by[alishatorn](http://alishatorn.tumblr.com/post/33639984404/art-masterpost-shadow-in-the-stars-based-on-and)  
_

_I stood at his side. We danced together, Sentinel and Vanguard, as if we'd trained together all along. Proctors and security staff alike went down hard. I knew he was hurt badly, bleeding inside, but he squeezed my hand as we made a stand. "You make me strong." He said. "Always."  
_

_But in all the shouting and the violence, before the main thrust of the riot happened? Shepard wasn't the one who killed Vyrnnus.  
_

_I was.  
_

_The Matriarchs finally calmed the situation, listened to our grievances. And Shepard collapsed. He spent weeks in the hospital. I spent weeks in solitary "meditation." And when we were finally let out, the Matriarchs called us in and asked what we intended to do.  
_

_Shepard looked them over and folded his arms still wrapped in stiff white bandages. "I'm going to apply to the SPECTREs," he said with the kind of certainty you only see in a teenager. "And I'm going to keep everyone safe from bastards like Vyrnnus."  
_

_Standing next to him in that room, stern blue faces looking down on us and a thousand years of history burned into the walls, I could only look up and say, "I stand with Shepard."_

~~

Chora's Den was tucked in between a roast varren stand and what Kaidan could only charitably describe as a "pharmacy". A turian with a tattered crest beckoned him over and Tali snorted.

"That bosh'tet is overpriced, makes money off people stumbling out of the bar. You want the elcor in block six for a bargain... or so I hear," she added quickly, as Kaidan quirked an eyebrow at her.  "I don't go for that sort of thing myself."

"It's none of my business, either way, Tali." Kaidan looked up at the bar's flickering sign. "And I promised you an extra twenty, so here."

"You're not a bad guy, SPECTRE," she said, pocketing the chit. "Don't get in over your head."

"Same to you, Tali'Zorah."  Kaidan watched the little quarian disappear into the crowd as the turian continued to hawk his chemical wares. Kaidan paused to make a purchase, and then made his way up the rickety stairs that led to Chora's.

There wasn't much to it, really. A circular bar with a stage in the centre, a lousy sound system, and a grim-eyed batarian slinging booze behind the bar. It wasn't the worst place Kaidan had ever found himself, but it was certainly far from the best.

The lights went down as he got closer, and he watched as a tiny little red-haired human woman gyrated on the stage. The batarian slapped a glass in front of him with a snort. "What're you drinkin', two eyes?"

"I'm just looking for someone." Kaidan turned his attention to the bartender. "I'm looking for Archangel."

The batarian snorted dismissively. "Lots of people looking for Archangel, pal."

His omnitool beeped softly, and Kaidan ignored it, fixing the batarian with a hard glare. "I already made a mess of one place, sir. I'd hate to wreck your fine establishment, too."

The bartender blinked very slowly, and filled Kaidan's glass with something greenish and fizzy. "On the house, SPECTRE. If Archangel wants t'find you? He'll find you. Not the other way around."

The beep at his wrist became more insistent, and Kaidan leaned forward. "I don't think you understand what I can do here, pal." He said, blue light dancing along his fingertips.

The omnitool made the loudest, most insistent noise Kaidan had ever heard, and he tapped it with an irritated noise. He didn't recognise the address. "What?" he growled.

"I don't think *you* understand what I can do with a sniper rifle, SPECTRE Alenko." A low, turian-accented drawl drew across his ear. "Take the drink and go sit in the back. Take in a lap dance while you're at it. I _mean_ it."

Kaidan scowled as he snatched the drink from the bar and found a booth at the back. The seats were hard and vaguely sticky, and he tried not to think too much about it as one of the dancers approached him. The man was slim, all long muscles and dark skin gleaming in the flickering lights. Kaidan's groin took a moment to inappropriately point out that he hadn't gotten laid in a very long time, and he twisted his wedding ring, hard, to remind himself of why.

Still, the dancer straddled him; hips grinding in time with some lousy dance remix of the "Vaenia" opening theme, and leaned forward with a whisper. "Archangel will see you in the back." He grinned a little, bracing himself on the back of Kaidan's seat. "But there's three Cerberus agents over by the bar he'd prefer you to deal with first."

Kaidan ran his hand down the dancer's back and pushed him closer to peer over his shoulder. One man at the bar, expensive black suit, tanned skin and eyes as black as the glossy hair pulled into a long ponytail. He looked as out of place at Chora's as Kaidan did, and was flanked by a man and a woman in skin-tight uniforms, somehow each more obscene than the barely clad man writhing on Kaidan's lap.

Kaidan didn't recognise him, but that didn't mean anything. Cerberus operated in cells - one head rarely knew what another did.  But even though the man wore no symbols, the logo on the arms of his companions was brazenly displayed.

"You have a pretty terrible clientele here." Kaidan whispered against the dancer's throat.  "But, I see that no one seems to surprised that you've got three members of a known terrorist organisation in your bar."

The dancer nibbled Kaidan's ear, and the SPECTRE did his best to ignore the fact that they were both hard and his body was starting to complain loudly about its need. "You'd be surprised, Alenko."  He murmured in between nibbles. "Humans are at the bottom of the food chain, even down here. Cerberus does a lot of outreach, a lot of positive stuff."

"You run with them?" Kaidan asked, pushing him back, looking at the dancer with a hard stare.

"Maybe I did once upon a time." He answered, sliding off Kaidan's lap in a slow, smooth motion. "I should let you get to work. My name's Jacob, by the way. Ask for me, next time."

Jacob faded away into the crowd and Kaidan found himself looking straight at the Cerberus agents.

He might not have recognised them, but they certainly knew who he was.

He'd been made.


	5. Chapter 5

_Turns out, that no matter how dedicated you are, no law enforcement agency is allowed to hire a fifteen-year-old. Shepard found that out the hard way, the morning he spent on his omnitool, pleading his case to everyone from a SPECTRE recruitment officer to some hapless dispatcher at the local C-Sec outpost.  
_

_The Matriarchs signed our licenses, blessed the jacks at base of our skulls and told us to get the hell out of the Temple before we caused any more trouble. Matriarch Aethyta, who smoked a pack and a half of high-tar cigs every day and had a voice like the wrong end of a garbage disposal, dragged us aside as soon as we were out of the Temple gates and forced us to go drinking with her. During the riots, she'd been the first one to actually listen. And then she made the others listen too.  
_

_"Alenko." She said, drunkenly grabbing my collar while Shepard lay drooling and passed out on the sticky table. "He's an idiot. He's good and he's noble, and frankly, if yer not bangin' like krogan in heat, then one of you is dead. But he's an idiot. You, on the other hand, actually have two brain cells t' rub together.  Fuck the other Matriarchs. I  c'n make you an assistant Proctor back at the Temple, give you a job while yer knight in shining armour gets his shit together."  
_

_After Shepard got done throwing up that night, in the motel Aethyta set us up in, I told him I accepted her offer. Figured I could go back, make a difference, make it better for the kids left behind.  
_

_He gave me that same cocky grin, the one that made me want to slap him and kiss him all at once and said he'd never imagined being married to a teacher.  
_

_And I told him he smelled like the cloaca end of a dumpster, and if he actually wanted us to celebrate our freedom properly, he was going to have to at least brush his teeth.  
_

~~ 

Kaidan's barrier flared to life as one of the Cerberus agents, the man in the catsuit, two flash-forged, monomolecular blades springing out of his wrists, charged him. The booth he'd been sitting in a moment before fell apart in sharp-edged slices as he rolled away. 

(Stasis) He gestured with one hand, unholstering the heavy Paladin under his coat as the bubble of energy swallowed his target. The other two had disappeared from sight and Kaidan cursed. They weren't just hiding in the crowd, he realised after a moment, they were running military-grade tactical cloaks. (Shit.) 

The music pounded and patrons and dancers alike screamed and scrambled for cover. A cheap cloak left a distortion field you could see if you knew what you were looking for, Kaidan thought. These were too good. 

He slammed the man in stasis through the concrete wall, dodging as the air behind him dropped a few degrees. The cloak's heat suppression function actually left a cold spot if you overclocked them, and he detonated his barrier, blue light rolling off Kaidan's body in waves. The force cleared a crater around him and rippled off the cloaks like a sonar blip. 

The female agent kicked him in the face, and Kaidan felt the sharp crack of bone in his cheek. He ducked another blow and wheeled, deep blue coat flaring around him as he put two bullets in her head. At his wrist, the omnitool pinged again, but instead of waiting for manual answer, an automatic override kicked the call to his earpiece. 

Electronically masked, but he recognised the voice all the same. "Kaidan, you have to get out of there." The Shadow Broker said. 

"If you're going to tell me about Cerberus, I already know!" He shouted, feeling the brush of cold air as a blade sliced neatly through the sleeve of his coat. A moment later there was the hot burn of blood. 

"Not Cerberus. SPECTREs. Kaidan, Saren is... Shit, Kaidan, Saren is right outside!" Liara yelled back. 

The air was split by the rapid retort of gunfire, and Kaidan felt the cold spot vanish. Panting, he leaned against the splintered remains of the bar and held pressure on his arm. 

Saren Arterius, his crest sweeping back from his face like daggers and his mandibles held together with too many years of surgical implants, strode into the bar, flanked by support agents. He towered over Kaidan, and looked down at him with a cold stare. "Major Alenko. Fancy meeting you here." 

"Commandant." Kaidan nodded. "I had a tip from an informant that... there was going to be a Cerberus deal going down here tonight." He lifted his chin towards the two dead agents. "One of them got away in the ruckus, though." 

"You've had a rough night, Major." Saren crooned, leaning forward. "Support will take your playmates back to HQ for autopsy.  I'll give you a ride home." He added. "You're not going to say no, are you, Major?" 

"No sir... and thank you." Kaidan swallowed hard. (Shit.) 

There was no sign of Jacob in the crowd, nor Archangel as Saren gripped his elbow and led Kaidan out of the club. The waiting aircar was sleek and black and looked as much as a weapon as Saren himself did. Even the mech behind the wheel looked deadly. 

The door hissed open and Kaidan let himself be put in the car. The seats were plush and the air cool as it rose, heading into local traffic. 

Saren popped open a medkit. "Kaidan." He said, flicking open a tube of medigel. Kaidan suppressed a shudder as the Commandant smoothed it on his injured arm with his talons. "I just want to say, I know the last few years haven't been easy for you." 

"Sir?" he croaked out as the gel cooled the burning gash on his arm. Saren's mandibles twitched in amusement and he smoothed another bit of gel on Kaidan's face. It tingled, going to work through torn tissue and cracked bone. 

"Well, I did have to put your husband down like a mad varren." Saren paused in his ministrations, claws resting against Kaidan's cheek, ever so gently pressing into the flesh. "I took no pleasure in it, though. John and Nihlus were both my good friends, Kaidan." The turian leaned in close, sharp eyes searching Kaidan's face for something. "I had no choice." 

"I know, sir." Kaidan swallowed, matching Saren's gaze. "I know you wouldn't have hurt John if you didn't have to." 

Saren stroked Kaidan's cheek with a little laugh. "I've always admired your professionalism, Kaidan. Good. Let's keep it that way." There was a soft chime from the driver, and Saren leaned back in his seat. "And we're here. Take tomorrow off, SPECTRE. I think you earned a vacation day." 

Kaidan muttered a thank you, and stepped out onto his balcony. The sky above was a lush collection of fanciful nebulae, washing the darkened Presidium in a delicate, iridescent display, and he waited until Saren's car was long gone before he sat down hard at the base of the cherry tree and tried to breathe again. 


	6. Chapter 6

_Shepard was the kind of C-Sec cop that they made vids about.  
_

_Honourable, hard-nosed and harder working - not to mention insanely good looking. He'd talked his way into the academy at sixteen (with a little assistance from Aethyta and my father's good word) and was a sergeant in Zakera Midcity by eighteen.  
_

_But despite any assistance at the beginning, he earned his stripes all on his own. No one could deny that in the least.  
_

_They still told stories about us at the Temple. Shepard, at least, and his riot. The few that knew I'd been the one to snap Vyrnnus' neck kept their mouths shut, and that worked for me.  
_

_I was back to counting the days.  
_

_It wasn't that I hated teaching. I actually kind of liked it. I liked being an academic, and I was a full Proctor by twenty-one.  
_

_But somewhere along the way, I'd gotten a taste of the fight. Of fighting for something *right* and it had tasted too sweet to forget.  
_

_We had a little flat in the top-end of Zakera Midcity. A Proctor made decent enough cred, but was normally expected to live on the Temple grounds. And the Matriarchs had made it clear that regardless of my employment Shepard was not welcome under any circumstances ever again.  
_

_So, one multipurpose room with a hotplate and a fridge the size of a shoebox. Attached shower/toilet combo that never had hot water but always had a great view of the flat across the way. Midcity, near the tube. Windows rattling all night as the trains thundered downward and the constant chatter of targeted vids selling everything from cars and biotic amps to funeral robes and escorts. Most nights we ate meatsub and vegipaste, both of which tasted roughly the same and like nothing else you'd ever eat, from the local vendafood, and lousy ramen from a mobile stall that liked to park down the end of the pedway.  
_

_The building was grimy and the neighbours were nosy, but the place was ours.  
_

_And every night, we made love amongst the mess of biotic lesson plans and patrol reports. The mattress was old and used and it smelled like sex.  Shepard would bury his face in the ugly ticking, trying to muffle himself as we fucked with the enthusiasm of the young and stupid.  
_

_He was loud, and, like I said, the neighbours were nosy.  
_

_But later, sweaty and tangled on our crappy mattress, we'd work out how to get the SPECTREs to finally take us.  
_

~~ 

Kaidan stood under the hot spray of the shower, scrubbing until his skin burned, unable to get the sensation of Saren's claws out of his mind. His cock ached too, the memory of Jacob grinding down against him making it harden as he rinsed the last of the soap away. 

The hallex he'd bought from the Undercity "pharmacy" was slowly kicking in and Kaidan licked his lips, steam ghosting around his skin as he stroked himself, forehead pressing against the bathroom wall. 

It was starting to blur together. The claws, the music, the hard shaft pressed against his own. He needed Shepard, more than anything. 

"Bob." He said to the air, stepping out into the foggy bathroom. "Queue up Shepard Five Seven Nine." 

"Very good sir. As a reminder, you have nineteen unread messages on your terminal." The VI chirped. "I have flagged them by urgency." 

"I'll look at them later, Bob." Kaidan sighed as he dragged the towel over his body, pausing to trace his own scars, remembering Shepard's mouth on each of them with a sigh. Still damp, Kaidan padded into the bedroom, vid flashing up on the big screen as he lay down. 

"I would never have thought you were such a pervert." Kaidan heard himself saying in the background. The screen was all Shepard, though. Blue eyes bright as he adjusted the camera, tongue darting between the swell of his lips as he concentrated. There were lines around their edges that Kaidan never remembered seeing then. A vaguely haunted edge in their depths. 

"I've decided I want to record everything." He said with a laugh, the ghost in his eyes fading for a moment. He no longer had the buzz-cut he'd worn as a C-Sec officer, and thick strands of bronze-red fell across his forehead. "You know, so you'll have something to remember me by when I go out in that blaze of glory Aethyta's always predicted." And there was that gorgeous smile. 

Kaidan remembered the camera, floating near the ceiling as Shepard pounced on the bed, and he watched his own hands stroking the length of Shepard's back in the vid, squeezing his rear as they kissed. 

"I hate it when you talk like that." The Kaidan of a few years back said, as he pushed Shepard down on the bed. "I want to grow old with you." 

"You're the only reason I _have_ to grow old, K." Shepard whispered, so softly the camera barely picked it up. 

Kaidan stroked himself harder as he watched, remembering Shepard's fingers carding through his hair, the gentle scrape of his nails on his scalp. The taste of Shepard's lips. On the vid, Shepard moved to take Kaidan in his mouth, deep and slow. His shaft twitched in his hands as he watched himself gently lube his husband, Shepard moaning against him with each thrust of a finger. 

The past-Kaidan sat up, and Shepard slid down onto his lap, back pressed against Kaidan's chest, head resting back on his shoulder. Putting himself on display for the camera, for the future. 

Too soon, Kaidan came, moaning his husband's name as his past-self was still thrusting into Shepard. He looked up at the screen, and those impossibly blue eyes were fixed hard on the camera, on the Kaidan watching the video. (I love you always.) Shepard mouthed to the camera. (No matter _what_ happens. I'm with you, always.) 

"Goddess damn you, John." He said to the ceiling, listening to Shepard come on the video, as noisy as he'd ever been. "You said you wanted to record everything. And I searched the whole house... I searched everywhere! Why the fuck couldn't you have left me a vid log?" Kaidan scrubbed his hands over his face, listening to himself tell Shepard how much he loved him, over and over until the video ended. 

Shepard had changed from those five days in the bowels of the Leviathan, Kaidan thought as he wiped himself clean. Nothing overt at first, but where he'd once put his trust fully in the SPECTREs and the Council, determined to make the Citadel a better place, he'd grown vaguely paranoid. And a strange tension had sprung up between Shepard and Saren, where before, they'd worked together perfectly well. 

Shepard had just been promoted to Commander when he and Nihlus had gone to investigate the strange chatter from the Eden Prime dig site, and everything went to hell. Kaidan twisted his wedding ring again with a sigh, running his thumb over the curving script in the grey metal. (Always.) "I miss you so much." Kaidan whispered, and turned off the light. 


	7. Chapter 7

_They called him "Shepard the Indestructible" after a high-speed crash into Kithoi Ward wiped out a section of the amphitheatre, crisped two of the five murderers he'd been pursuing, and broke Shepard's leg in seven places.  
_

_You watch a vid like Blasto, and you think that kind of durability, that kind of sheer, goddamn relentlessness is just something you go see for fifteen creds and a bucket of crispcorn. Unless you knew Shepard.  
_

_He'd bitten back the pain and made what experts still consider to be a nearly impossible series of biotic actions and shots. He grabbed one of the remaining three with a pull, slammed him into another, and when the third tried to grab a hostage, knocked all three up in the air with a shockwave, then put a bullet through each of their skulls in quick succession.  
_

_The very next day, an official from SPECTRE HQ finally returned his calls while I sat at his bedside in the med clinic, eating his crap-tasting jelly.  
_

_He was twenty-one.  
_

_To say that there was finally a human in the elite was big news is the understatement of the century. But Shepard hated the whole circus atmosphere about it. He just wanted to fight bad guys, after all.  
_

_And for a while, I thought things were perfect, more perfect than two messed up biotic kids could ask for.  
_

_Until Shepard roped me into helping him with a case involving a high-powered asari courtesan turned serial killer. It had been suspected there was a traitor in the Justicars - the asari-only enforcement branch of the Council court system - that allowed her free reign with her killing. We'd found ten bodies. We had a suspicion the actual count was ten, twenty times that.  
_

_I agreed to be the bait, a lonely but well-off professor, looking for love in all the wrong places. She was beautiful, and rotten down to the core of her space-cold heart. When the biotic violence was over, and Shepard had her in custody, her family, including a Justicar, tried to buy me off.  
_

_I said no, and ended up helping to bring down an entire ring of corruption in the courts.  
_

_They called me "Alenko the Incorruptible" and I got the call while Shepard and I were setting up the aquarium in our new home.  
_

_I was twenty-five, and we never found the rest of her victims._

~~ 

Kaidan stirred, blinking groggy eyes open with a sense of creeping dread. 

Something was wrong. 

He lay perfectly still in his bed, keeping his breathing even. The security curtain on the open balcony shimmered in the shifting colours of the night sky and there was the gentle burble of the aquarium across the room. But the other sounds he'd grown accustomed to were off. The regular hum of late night aircabs outside his window, the familiar, rhythmic clunk of the breadmaker in the kitchen kneading dough for breakfast. The way Bob sang to itself in the dark, an odd little electronic lullaby that Shepard had fallen in love with and programmed it to hum at night. 

_Muffled_. 

The same security protocols that Shepard had installed in the kitchen, a silent running zone free from any type of observation, were in place around the bedroom. And they weren't any Shepard or Kaidan had put in place. 

(Shit.) He closed his eyes, listening as much with his powers and his body as his ears. For the minute feedback of a tactical cloak, the cold spot, an echo on the barriers he kept up even in his sleep. (There.) 

The faintest scrape of a footstep. A cool breeze where there shouldn't be one. Kaidan rolled off the bed moments before the knife plunged down. He grabbed his Paladin from under what had been Shepard's pillow and fired. 

One hit home, the cloak flickering and breaking as the bullet tore into the body beneath. 

And it wasn't the Cerberus agent from before. It was a SPECTRE. 

"Bau, what the hell?" Kaidan shouted, levelling his weapon. Jondam Bau was a salarian, a respected field agent, and had, at one time, been a friend. 

Kaidan was fairly certain that last part was over. 

"I take no pleasure in this, Alenko," the salarian said through gritted teeth. He blinked, inner eyelids flicking rapidly. "But you're a liability." 

"Bau, listen to me, whatever Saren's got you caught up in..." Kaidan pleaded, half lowering his gun. "We can figure this out. The Council..." 

"The Council needs to be preserved, Alenko. The Citadel needs to be preserved." He tapped a code out on his omnitool and held it up. "Incinerate overload. Sorry, Alen..." 

Kaidan put a bullet through his head before Bau could finish the sentence, and he was on the salarian before the body hit the ground. (Hardwired override system, can't hack it. Counting down fast) he thought frantically, scanning Bau's armour. Quickly, Kaidan dragged Bau to the balcony, and hit the barrier hard. (Cyclonic barrier all access points, keyed to Bau's biorhythms, probably. SHIT.) 

A hard biotic shove to dump the bed over Bau's body and Kaidan threw up every defensive barrier he knew how to generate. There was a high-pitched noise as Bau's armour reached critical and Kaidan scrambled back as far as he could before everything vanished in a fireball. 


	8. Chapter 8

_The Leviathan was off limits to everyone. The Junkers wouldn't go near it if you paid them up front and it had been declared of "no historical value" by every university on the Citadel.  
_

_All anyone knew for certain is that it was as big as a ward, blacker than space and haunted as hell.  
_

_Not haunted by the kind of ghosts that kids in the Temple talk about, hiding under the sheets at lights out, trying to scare each other. Real ghosts. Undead. Some of them look human. Asari. Turian. You name it. Every species on the Citadel that's ever set foot in the graveyard, some of them didn't make it back.  
_

_And they didn't have the grace to die, either.  
_

_So a floating horror show, entry banned by force of law. What better place for the officers of the most elite supralegal organisation in the world to be total assholes? You can always decline, of course. I did, after all.  
_

_But somewhere inside Shepard was still that beat-up little duct rat. The boy who had to prove he was good enough to be a SPECTRE. When Saren challenged him to beat his time, I don't think John could have said yes fast enough.  
_

_I hated it. Hated sitting at HQ while the turians and salarians and asari around me placed bets on how long he'd last. Hated worrying about him and at the same time hated that they thought he was weak.  
_

_No atmo in the Leviathan, so just one fragile man in a hardsuit, nutrient gel fed in through the helmet and the waste processing system keeping him from swimming in his own shit. For any SPECTRE, getting into armour is like having intensely awkward sex, but Shepard loved it.  
_

_I have to admit, I tolerate my own hardsuit and the microframe undersuit below it. But I loved watching Shepard in his, and I loved peeling him out of it.  
_

_But this, this was different. Watching the jittery feed from his helmet as he made his way through corridors designed with no rational sense, all I felt was sick. Terrified, even as he joked about it. Half the time, the feed went dark, dead spots in a dead ship, and I thought I couldn't breathe until he came back online.  
_

_And the more I wanted him to come home, the more Saren egged him on to stay.  
_

_After three and a half days of watching him kill the shambling things that roamed the corridors - dried out husks with coils of wires protruding from their bodies, lights flickering under their brittle skin - I finally begged him to come home.  
_

_His voice was strange when he replied to me, and I almost could have believed it wasn't really him. "I can't, Kaidan. I've found something really important."  
_

_On day five, when he called for pickup finally, I was in the shuttle. Shepard pulled off his helmet and those bright eyes were dark and alien for a moment. I said his name, and just that quickly, he was John again.  
_

_He never told me what he found._

 ~~ 

"He's coming around," someone said about a thousand miles away and into a bucket, Kaidan thought stupidly. His vision was blurry and there was a ringing sound that wouldn't stop. 

"What the hell happened?" is what Kaidan attempted to say, but it came out "Whaddahelhap?" - mouth refusing to cooperate with his brain in any way. 

"Take it easy, Alenko," another voice in a bucket said, oddly familiar, and Kaidan blinked, trying to clear his eyes. 

"Garsss," he garbled out, looking at the scarred-up turian with the blue face paint. "Uggy'slawyz..." 

"That is _no_ way to talk to the turian who pulled your naked ass out of a burning apartment, Alenko." Archangel sat back, rubbing his mandibles. His clothes were perfectly tailored, enhancing all the pointy architecture of a turian body. Even on a SPECTRE's salary, it wouldn't be an easy purchase. 

There was the cold sting of a hypo on his arm and the ringing in his skull slowly quieted down as things began to repair themselves. "Garrus... wh..." 

"What was I doing at your apartment? You should check your messages, SPECTRE. A ... mutual acquaintance of ours left you several." Garrus folded his arms, the plates on his face pulling into a frown. 

"L... the Shadow Broker." Kaidan rubbed his jaw and sat up. "Where am I?" 

"Safehouse. You don't need to know where." The turian poured himself a drink of something bright green and overly-sweet smelling. "Military barriers on your place kept the explosion contained, so your neighbours are all still alive, but you're going to need a new fishtank. And coffeemaker. And apartment in general," he drawled. 

"You have got some seriously impressive biotics, though." A voice behind him said, and Kaidan, turned, slowly and very painfully, to see Jacob, the dancer. He was wearing a neat grey suit instead of a thong, and the weapons peeking out from under his coat were quite real. "Kasumi was amazed you weren't dead after she cracked the barrier." 

"Yeah, well, I'm just all sorts of special." Kaidan smacked his lips, mouth tasting of blood and ash. "It was another SPECTRE who tried to kill me." 

"So I heard." Garrus got up and started to pace. "You came to see me for a reason last night, Kaidan, and now both of my key meeting places are destroyed - your fault by the way - then I came home to find a Cerberus agent tearing my apartment apart - an apartment not even in my name, thank you - and your coworkers are blowing themselves up to get to you. What in all the spirits have you gotten yourself into?" 

"Shepard." Kaidan lay back on the bed. "The Broker gave me some intel.  The Eden Prime footage was doctored... and there have been reports, sketchy ones but... I think Shepard's on Omega." 

"I have contacts on Omega." Garrus set his glass down hard. "I would have heard if he were there _and_ alive." 

"Garrus, you OWE us this. You owe HIM this. He saved your life." Kaidan growled. "He saved your life on Omega from a goddess-damned army out to end your little cleanup brigade." 

"Don't you think I *know* I owe him my life, Kaidan?" Garrus spat back. "Liara's sure about the footage?" 

"As sure as she can be. Her tech doesn't know what Shepard was actually killing in that vid, but it sure as hell wasn't any researchers," Kaidan said, taking a long breath that set his lungs to aching. "I haven't given up on him in two years. Please..." 

Garrus made a low, irritated sound. "We can't go to the Presidium docks. The whole place is crawling with C-Sec, and if your SPECTRE pals are out to do you in..." He made a clicking noise, then nodded, striding out of the room. "Give me a few." 

"I managed to salvage a few things for you," the woman sitting on the edge of the bed said brightly, and Kaidan nearly screamed. She was tiny, just the hint of a smile peeking out from the deep hood of her coat.  "Don't feel bad," she giggled, tugging her hood forward. "No one sees me unless I want them to. Now, be a good boy and open your present." 

Jacob snorted beside him. "Kasumi's the best in the business." 

"And you're more than a talented dancer," Kaidan said, unfolding his coat (singed on the edges, but wearable), some clothes, and his hat. tucked in the folds were his badge... and Shepard's.  "Thank you, Kasumi," he added, but she was already gone. 

"Man's gotta pay the bills somehow," Jacob joked, taking a seat on the edge of a nearby desk as Kaidan gingerly sat up. 

"Point," Kaidan rasped, pulling his clothes on. They smelled like smoke, but the texture was comforting and familiar against his skin. "What do you really do?" 

"Whatever needs doing." The other man grinned at him. "And I'm talented at that too." 

Kaidan was finishing his buttons when Garrus came back. It was hard to tell when a turian was smiling, but there something almost jaunty to the set of his mandibles. "Pack your non-existent bags, Alenko. We're going to Omega."


	9. Chapter 9

_The best parts of Omega make the Citadel's Undercities look like the Presidium. It had been a mining station once, long before anyone's living memory, at least. After that, the books say it had been a fortress in a failed revolution at the dawn of the Citadel's history.  
_

_But now it was a just a frontier city full of crooks and scum with a sour smell in its very pores. The smell of lost hope and desperation mixed with misery and cheap booze.  
_

_Omega was deeply unfriendly to Citadel law, but even so, not beyond the reach of a SPECTREs pursuit.  
_

_Shepard and I had hopped a freighter supposedly bound for a salvage station, one that just happened to have a secondary stop to Omega on its itinerary. A ten hour trip in a hold full of salvage equipment and emergency rations, mixed in with about two tons of illicit creeper from some agri-station closer to home.  
_

_We were chasing a biotic terrorist who'd tried to blow the Temple up. Shepard seemed like himself as we joked about having seriously mixed feelings about the mission. I knew he'd been having restless dreams since Leviathan which he waved off as a normal reaction to anyone being stupid enough to spend more than an hour in a place like that.  
_

_I never argued with him about it.  
_

_But he seemed fine, and calm as we amused ourselves in the hold, Shepard in my lap as he rode me with a slow, easy fuck. He twined his hands with mine and kissed my wedding ring.  
_

_He seemed fine when we spent the next two hours fighting off a pirate attack as well.  
_

_We eventually caught the terrorist, shot up a number of fine establishments and saved the life of a plug-ugly turian vigilante in the process. Afterwards, I got food poisoning and Shepard got a hangover at the bar of a very angry asari. We couldn't agree who had it worse.  
_

_It seemed like a job well done, and business as usual all the way around. Until Shepard woke up screaming on the return trip about the Monsters in the Dark._

~~

 

It was raining in the Shalta Ward shipyards when they arrived in an aircar Garrus rented under a fake ID. But the rain didn't slow the constant pace of organic and mech crews welding metal and straightening beams on the transports and freighters that made the long hauls through the Ring.

Garrus led them through a maze of salvaged parts and ruined hulls until they reached the Shalta Point Bays. Almost at the tip of the ward, the atmo was thin and harsh, and the gravity felt as if it might give at any moment.

And it was cold. Colder than any part of the Citadel Kaidan had ever been to. He hunched down in his coat and frowned at Garrus. "Great neighbourhood. I might see about moving here, since I can't go back to my apartment."

"You have to admit, the view is pretty spectacular." Garrus pointed at the Ring, starfields flickering beyond it in the distance. "But this is what we're here for."

It was a ship - smaller than any Kaidan had ever seen. It would have easily fit in the hold of a standard transport. The basic lines were graceful, but it had been patched and re-patched enough times that the hull was a mess of seams and lumps. "It looks like a piece of shit." Kaidan offered. "It doesn't look like you could move it on a dolly without it falling apart, let alone spaceworthy."

"That's because you don't know jack shit about spaceships."

They turned at the voice, followed by the heavy clomp of mechanised footsteps. "Garrus Vakarian," the man in the grease-spattered mechsuit said. "Goddess, you get uglier every time I see you."

"Nice to see you too, Joker." Garrus rolled his eyes. "Kaidan Alenko, meet Jeff Moreau. Joker, this is.."

"The Second Human SPECTRE. And husband to the late Butcher of Eden Prime. Also, wanted for murder," Joker said, arms of his suit shrugging with a whine of hydraulics. "What? I watch the news."

"Wait. Wanted for _murder_?" Kaidan held up a hand. "Garrus, is this what you meant that the Presidium docks were crawling with C-Sec?"

"I figured you were waking up from a concussion. Didn't need to sweat the small stuff." The turian shrugged as well.

"Who did I supposedly murder?" Kaidan rubbed the bridge of his nose. "There couldn't have been anything left of Bau... not the way his suit exploded."

"Jondam Bau, executive assistant to SPECTRE Commandant Saren Arterius was found dead at the home of fellow SPECTRE Kaidan Alenko this morning." Joker read a newsfeed off the suit's windscreen. "Mate to the infamous Commander John Shepard, Alenko has been missing since last night and is a person of great interest. Shall I go on? It's riveting stuff, especially how you've been an unstable psycho mess since Shepard got spaced."

"Don't bother." Kaidan sighed. "Looks like the vacation Saren wanted me to take really is permanent."

"Is this going to be a problem, Joker?" Garrus asked.

"What the fuck do I care if celebrity supercops are offing each other?" Joker responded with a snort. "EDI and I have already been paid, so you get a ride to Omega and back."

"EDI, is that the name of your ship?" Kaidan squinted up at the little frigate in the rain, and tugged his hat down, water beading on the brim.

"What? No!" Joker clanked towards the ship. "She's called Normandy. EDI's a sweet little AI I... _acquired_ a few years back."

"Jeffrey won me in a poker game with Cerberus scientists on Omega." A woman's sultry voice said from the mechsuit's speakers. "I am a next-generation combat AI. But I thought Jeffrey was.. cute. And I rather disliked my employers, so I assisted him in cheating by accessing his mobility suit's microframe."

"EDI runs the Normandy's systems, meaning I don't need a crew. Saves me some serious creds." The ship's equipment bay slid open, and there was a grinding noise as Joker jerked a robotic thumb in the direction of the ramp. "I'll see you guys on board."

"Wait, you said you'd already been paid." Kaidan interrupted him. "By whom?"

"By me." Liara said, leaning against one of the Normandy's struts in a stylish travelling suit, a velvet shawl draped over her head against the chill. A little smile quirked across her pretty blue face. "And you're late, Major Alenko."


	10. Chapter 10

_I'd first met Liara when she came to the Temple to give a lecture on Citadel history to my underclassmen. We'd hit it off immediately.  
_

_After I'd joined Shepard in the SPECTREs, the Shadow Broker approached me as an underworld informant, a dealer who knew the ins and outs of every seedy deal from the Presidium to Zakera Point. An altered voice in my earpiece giving me information with the understanding that I might be asked to do them a favour in the future.  
_

_As John took to talking in his sleep about Old Machine Gods and Monsters in the Darkness, I found myself having lunch with my historian friend, asking her if she had any insight into what he could be talking about, maybe some piece of lore a duct rat might have picked up from a storyteller in the depths.  
_

_Liara didn't, but then the Shadow Broker passed on that some strange chatter was happening over on Eden Prime. Something weird was going on with the researchers muttering about Old Machines in their reports. Nonsense strings of numbers and letters.  
_

_It sounded too much like Shepard's dreams to be a coincidence. But after I told him...  
_

_He took the intel for himself, and we shouted at each other after he kicked a drug op my way to partner with Nihlus instead. Four years as SPECTREs together. We'd run every op as a pair since I'd been installed.  
_

_I called him things I never thought I would. He called me a stubborn fool. But even after the shouting died down, he didn't give me that cocky smile he always did after we argued, just shoved his badge in my hand and promised he'd be home soon.  
_

_He looked so tired.  
_

_We never even said goodbye.  
_

_That night, Liara admitted to me she was my informant, and after the recriminations died down, we could only wait together for news.  
_

_And none of it was good._

~~

 

If the outside of the Normandy looked like a bad patch job, the inside was worse, Kaidan thought. restoration, what there was of it, had not exactly been made with passenger comfort in mind. 

Shaking off the rain, they took the lift to the bridge, where Joker settled himself into a thickly padded seat. Out of the mech, he was frail-looking - with a patchy beard and a scattering of sores on his pale skin. Greasy coveralls and a tattered cap pulled down over his scruffy hair.  Kaidan could see he had subdermal microframe implants, thin ridges from his fingertips, vanishing up under his sleeves. Cheap ones compared to the seamless implants the Temple or the SPECTREs installed, with bad heat dumps, if the burns on the back of one hand was any indicator. 

One arm had a free-clinic gelsplint strapped to it and he shrugged, following Kaidan's line of sight. "I tripped last night. Brittlebone disease. It's pretty common when you have a shitty low-g childhood in the bowels of a Graveyard dust-sucker." He snorted as the displays came up around him. "I'm a delicate flower, what can I say." 

"Jeff, I will begin cycling the engines for prelaunch checks." EDI's voice curled out of the speakers like cigarette smoke. 

"Thanks, babe." Joker's fingers danced over the displays, even as he addressed Kaidan. "Don't you be getting any ideas, there, chief." 

"I'm married, Moreau, but thanks for the warning." Kaidan ran his thumbnail over the edge of his ring, hand shoved in his pocket. 

"Sh'yeah. To a murdering psychopath. Good life choice _there_ , boss." Joker's snort died off as the metal plates on the bridge floor started to hum, blue sparks dancing off them. 

"Jeffrey. I believe that was very rude to Major Alenko." EDI said. "I am registering sharp spikes in Normandy's electrical systems and..." 

"I got it, I got it." He swivelled the chair to meet Kaidan's gaze full on. "Sorry. That was uncalled for. Sometimes I just say shit without thinking.  All I got going for me is a smart mouth and a fast ship." 

"We're good." Kaidan let the power fade, dissipating into the ship. "Where'd you get her, anyways?" 

"Found her, hiding in a field of planetary debris. Junkers'd stripped her of everything portable a long time ago. Not even bodies left on board. She's an old girl, military, probably. But the drive core on this thing? Never seen anything like it, it's a monster. Too big and too complex even for a quarian team to strip out I guess, so they left it. Restored her with whatever bits and pieces I could beg, borrow or steal. The nav display's totally original to her, though. Enough of her processors were hidden well enough to save them. Can't really read any of the text displays, it's all dead language, but I know her like my own body. Better even." An enormous grin curled across his face. "And she'll do the Omega run in eight hours." 

"Good thing, since the rest of the ship is a tetanus hazard." Garrus drawled from the doorway. "I feel like I'm going to get lockjaw every time I set foot in here." 

"It could only be an improvement." Joker muttered, turning back to his displays. 

Under their feet, there was a hum, more like the silent, gliding engine of an expensive aircar than the rumble of a long-run freighter's drive. 

It almost sounded like the lullaby Shepard had programmed into Bob, the ship singing as EDI brought the drive core online. 

"Shalta Control, this is Normandy, requesting exit vectors. Logging destination as Caleston Mines." Joker's demeanour immediately changed as he watched the ship's power grids come up. 

"Jeff, control has uploaded our exit vector. We are free to proceed," EDI purred and Joker placed his arms into the heart of the golden lights hovering in front of his seat, eyes sliding shut in pleasure. 

Peculiar greenish light danced along the microframe under his skin, like the glow under the brittle flesh of the husks Kaidan had watched through Shepard's helmet feed a lifetime ago. Joker sighed in delight as the Normandy, and EDI, interfaced with him. 

"Ok, babes. Let's rock this show," he said as the Normandy pulled free from her docking clamps and lifted out of atmo, trailing clouds in her wake. 


	11. Chapter 11

_They didn't even bring me a body home to burn at the Temple. I had to offer prayers to an empty urn while Aethyta and Liara stood vigil with me. There was a sea of reporters, carrion eaters ringing the courtyard, looking for a corpse.  
_

_It took everything I had to not bring the whole place down on the lot of them.  
_

_Saren laid that giant,_ _taloned_ _paw on my shoulder and told me how he'd wished things had gone differently, and when I looked into his eyes there was something cold, something abnormal.  
_

_They were as dark and strange as Shepard's had been when he'd returned from the Leviathan, and suddenly what I'd chalked up to his growing paranoia didn't seem so out there.  
_

_I felt sick to my stomach, and my husband's badge was the only thing that kept me from retching up bile on Saren's feet. A  small, reassuring weight in my jacket pocket.  But the comfort didn't last long. The supposedly secure vids from Saren's armour were on the extranet within hours of the funeral, on the mainline newsfeeds by morning.  
_

_And just like that, the second human SPECTRE became the only one.  
_

_When I tried to call the Council on it, Saren on it, it was explained as a system glitch.  Eden Prime was put on the prohibited list and I was put on the bench.  
_

_Within days, they took my assignments and I was reassigned to the Cerberus desk, keeping tabs on pro-human terrorists and agitators.  
_

_Within weeks, they took my identity - I had a beard and temporary subdermal implants to change my cheekbones. Shepard always joked I had eyes like whiskey, and I made them give me contacts as close to his as possible - bright, clear blue like a Presidium sky.  
_

_I went undercover, and that was when I met Miranda.  
_

~~ 

Liara had taken over a section of Joker's ship with a collection of terminals, and she was busy alternately typing and shooing Kasumi away as Kaidan found her. 

"Liara, I didn't expect to find you coming with us," he said, sitting down on a nearby equipment box. 

"This has gone on long enough, Kaidan," she said absently. "I'll have Bob back online in a bit, if you want, along with your home data." 

"You salvaged my system?" He blinked. 

"I set your home system to back up to the Broker's mainframe." She gave him a sweet little smile. "Don't worry, I never looked at any of your... home movies. For too long." 

"I'll be mad about the invasion of privacy later." He laughed raggedly. "You know, for someone so damn interested in filming everything, you would have thought he would have left a diary for me to find." Kaidan scrubbed his hands through his hair, the Normandy singing around them. 

"I know we looked," she sighed. "He didn't leave any clues at all." 

(I'm with you, always.) Shepard's bright, haunted eyes, fixed on the future. 

"Liara. Would you be able to put a storage device in something like a ring?" Kaidan looked at the band of shining grey metal, script dark against its surface. 

"It's possible." She took his hand, gentle blue fingers dancing across it. "...May I?" 

He felt oddly naked as he struggled the ring off. There was a pale dent in his finger, marking the flesh where it belonged. "I haven't had it off since John... I haven't had it off," he said, reluctantly handing it to her. 

Her own VI assistant, Glyph, sparked to life next to the terminal, and Liara set it to scanning. "Even if there's something in here, Kaidan, I'm not sure how Shepard would have..." 

"There's some sort of microcomp in the badge," Kasumi piped up, holding Shepard's badge in her tiny hands. "See, the back comes off." 

Kaidan scrambled off his box to grab her wrist, the bones so fragile in his grip. At least he'd felt it when the quarian girl had tried to pick his pocket. He'd never even sensed Kasumi's presence. 

"Settle down, SPECTRE. I didn't break it." Kasumi's eyes were bright in the shadows of her hood. "Your hubby found a real craftsman to make this. I'm impressed." 

Kaidan let her go and slid the plate the rest of the way from Shepard's badge. It didn't look like much, more smooth metal, except for an indentation the size and shape of a wedding ring. 

"You're with me always," Kaidan breathed, and fit his ring in the space.


	12. Chapter 12

_Miranda reminded me of Shepard in too many ways for me to be comfortable around her.  
_

_Cocky and self-assured. Gorgeous and a powerful biotic in her own right. Insanely driven but desperate to prove herself. Except where Shepard had dedicated himself to the safety of everyone on the Citadel, Miranda was devoted to showing how loyal she was to the secretive leader of her little humans-only club.  
_

_Saren had put me undercover by saying he hoped I could ferret out the Elusive Man, but by then it was clear he was hoping I'd turn traitor so he could eliminate me like he'd done with Shepard.  
_

_She did outreach, soup kitchens for human families in the Tayseri Undercity. At least, that's what she told me.  
_

_I wormed my way into her trust, and with every lie, I felt like the old nickname of "Alenko the Incorruptible" was a sick joke. I told her my wife had died in a foodpaste riot in Zakera Undercity, trampled underneath a krogan's foot. Told her I wanted to change things. Wanted to make the Citadel a better place for humans.  
_

_And despite my discomfort, we grew... close. It hurt, true, all the ways she reminded me of Shepard, but it was a familiar hurt. And a familiar hurt can turn into something comforting.  
_

_It's possible I fell in love with her during those days.  It's possible that when we kissed, it wasn't Shepard's lips I was thinking of, and I hated myself for all of it.  
_

_I spent almost a year living a lie, while in the background, Liara's agents kept me up to date on Saren's movements.  
_

_Then, one day, Miranda showed up to my apartment. She'd been given the ok to bring me in, to help humanity even further.  
_

_And there, in a squalid lab beneath the soup kitchen, harsh lights, and dirty floors, she showed me what was behind the curtain.  
_

_Duct rats. Shivering children in locked rooms. An army, she said. They were uplifting them to fight for dominance of the Citadel. It didn't give her any joy, Miranda cried against my shoulder.  
_

_I didn't see any uplift at work, just torture and haunted eyes. Some of them were biotics, little ones who should have found some sort of better refuge at the Temple, rather than in rooms barely better than a cell.  
_

_"Why?" I asked her. "How could you do this to your own people? To children?"  
_

_"The Elusive Man says we don't belong here. We're prisoners and we can't escape, can't find our way home until we get free of our alien oppressors." Her eyes were overly bright, and she clutched my shirt. "We have to get free of this place."  
_

_In the cold glare of a secret research lab, I told Miranda I was shutting them down.  
_

_And she just smiled at me, the kind of smile that made you want to slap her and kiss her all at once. She put a gun to her head and then said, "I know about Eden Prime, Major."  
_

_She was dead before the last syllable left her lips._

~~ 

Kaidan didn't realise he was holding his breath until the ring turned by itself in the slot and there was a gentle, tiny click. 

The holo was small, low quality. Shepard had gone for compression factors rather than resolution, and Kaidan's fingers went numb as he saw the man's face. There were dark circles under Shepard's eyes. Long, nervous fingers twitched as he spoke. 

"Kaidan, if you're watching this... well, let's hope it was that blaze of glory I hoped for." Shepard said with a rueful smile across the years. "But, let's be honest. It was probably Saren." 

"John." He gripped the badge tighter. "Why..." Liara's hand was cool and gentle - a small, reassuring weight resting on his arm. The rest of the Normandy's cavernous interior and their companions seemed to fade away, his focus solely on the flickering image cradled in his palm. 

"Look. You're going to have a lot of questions, I know. I can't risk telling you to your face, I can't risk Saren being suspicious of you too. I _won't_ risk you, Kaidan." Shepard took a drink from out of the recorder's range and set it back on the ghost of a tabletop with a clatter. 

"There's so much in my head, K. It's the Leviathan, it's not a derelict. It's not even really a ship. It's _alive,_ Kaidan. It's an Old God, the Monster in the Dark, and it's dreaming." He was more agitated than Kaidan had ever seen him, even that last fateful argument. "This sounds crazy, I _know_ it sounds crazy, but it spoke to me, whispered to me after I'd been holed up in a duct for a few days. And I know it spoke to Saren, too." 

The tale Shepard spun out in between drinks made Kaidan's skin crawl. The husks weren't ghosts.  Weren't forgotten souls trapped in a dead ship. The Leviathan was _making_ them, calling people to it. Trying to create _something_ as it dreamed. Something horrific. And it went so much deeper than that. 

"It tried to convince me to take off my helmet, to let it in." Shepard said at the end of the first entry. "I said no. I'm pretty sure Saren said yes." He glanced over his shoulder. "Gotta go. I'll add more soon." 

Shepard's image stuttered off and Kaidan stared at the badge in his hand. 

"Goddess," Liara whispered beside him. "He's right, Kaidan. It does sound insane." 

"He said there was more." Kaidan ignored her, tapping the badge to bring up the next entry. 

"Hey." Shepard said, rubbing his face. "You.. you're asleep in the bedroom as I'm recording this. I can hear you snoring, just for the record, despite your insistence otherwise, K."  He quirked a smile and set a small, slim shard of dark metal on the desk.  "Anyways, remember when I said I'd found something important? It wasn't just the fact that I had this Old God crooning in my ear, Kaidan. It was this." 

He tapped it. "It's.. well, I dunno. I dunno what it is. You were always smarter than me, maybe you'll be able to figure it out eventually. But it's like a... memory shard. I found it on a corpse in the duct I was crawling through." Shepard sighed. "I caught sight of it out of the corner of my eye, and shut my feeds off before I turned. I didn't want anyone to see, not till I was sure." 

Shepard leaned forward, staring hard into the camera. "It was an alien, Kaidan. Like no species on the citadel. It looked like a giant bug - but not the kind the keepers at the Temple are. I... and I think it was trying to claw its way out when it died. It was holding this." He picked up the shard and turned it over in his fingers. "When I touched it, it.. it dumped memories, thoughts into my head. It crowded out the Old God and it told me a story.  The goddess didn't bring us here to uplift us, to protect us from the Monsters in the Dark. She... and her people... _collected_ us, from across the stars, to bring us here so that thing in the graveyard could... could, I dunno... observe us? Play with us."

Shepard started to grow agitated again and he set the shard down with a sharp clack. "We were supposed to have all these homeworlds that we were uplifted from. But we don't have any stories from them. There are millions and millions of miles of debris round the Citadel, and even though the Junkers have been stripping the ships, for generations, we don't have any star maps. We don't have any stories. They took them from us, Kaidan." He whispered loudly. "I'm gonna go to the Central Archives as soon as I can. I... I need to look something up." 

Shepard took a deep breath. "I'm going to go back to bed and wake you up now. Don't worry. I'll make it worth your while." He grinned faintly. "More soon." 

Kaidan closed his hand over the badge, squeezing until the edges of the metal dug painfully into his hand. 

"Kaidan. What he's saying is, it's nearly impossible," Liara said gently. "I've spent my life researching..." She paused. "...researching Citadel history." She squeezed his arm, absently, before turning back to her screens. "Maybe you should find somewhere else to listen to the rest of the messages. I need to do a little digging." 

Kaidan placed his hand over hers and gave it a little squeeze in return. "I think you're right." His heart ached worse than his hand, Shepard's badge still tightly gripped in his hand. He didn't seem crazy. Agitated, worried, yes. 

But no crazier than he'd ever seemed. Kaidan closed his eyes, bringing the badge to his lips. 

"Hey." Jacob was at his side, gently gripping Kaidan's elbow, and he blinked. The man was warm and solid, and the memory of his lap dance burned in Kaidan's groin. "I found a quiet spot below deck. You can... listen to him there. We're still six hours out of Omega." He whispered, close to Kaidan's ear. 

"Thanks." Kaidan let Jacob guide him down the rickety metal stairs as the ship sang around them.


	13. Chapter 13

_On the one year anniversary of Shepard's death, they finally let me come home, let me say my prayers. There were anonymous flowers sent with a hit of high-test hallex hidden in the vase.  
_

_I took a tab with the whiskey he always bought me and watched the videos Shepard took. I watched us making love, I watched the birthdays and the stupid pie he tried to make me one year. The apartment smelled like burned asari honeywine for three days. I watched the lines grow on his face and the circles under his eyes that I'd ignored when they were happening.  
_

_And that night, I dreamed he was in my arms, my name on his lips. He was beautiful, eyes blue as crystal, innocent and brave as a child.  
_

_I told him I believed him, believed *in* him. Told him I knew Saren had framed him. Told him I loved him. I loved him so much.  
_

_"Don't forget, Kaidan." He moaned as we came together, as perfect as any memory.  
_

_"I'll never forget." I promised him. "Never."  
_

_The next morning, I woke up to a wreck of a bedroom and mission.  
_

_I was going to find out what the hell Saren was up to. What the hell happened on Eden Prime._

~~ 

Jacob seemed disappointed when Kaidan waved him off, finding a seat on an uncomfortable jut of metal. 

Each successive entry, Shepard seemed more exhausted. Three years of them. Irregularly spaced - some were frantically clustered together, but most, longer gaps between them each time. Some were Shepard trying to explain the visions the shard had given him, or the Old God's whisper sometimes still in the back of his head. Some were pure data, search strings from the archives with hasty notes appended. (Only three ships ever logged to go beyond the Graveyard. None returned. No unmanned probes ever sent.) (Earliest archive image of Athame, look at the head. She looks like the corpse I found.) (Saren knows. I heard him talking to himself in his office, Kaidan. Partial recording attached. It's not turian dialect he's speaking. it's the Old God's language. it's watching through his eyes because it's not awake, not yet, anyways.) 

Most of the entries were nonsense words. "You were hiding how hard this was on you it was for my sake," he said to a strange collection of letters and numbers scrolling across the screen. Alien characters Shepard had hacked into the VI interface. 

With a start, he suddenly realised they looked familiar. They looked like the gibberish that had been embedded in the intel Liara had given him, and Kaidan frowned. 

(The Citadel is a lie) the second to last entry read. There was a series of Municipal Works reports detailing how areas were simply being closed off and left unrepaired. This was followed by another string of data. 

"Not data," Kaidan said to himself, a strange feeling rising in his chest. A mix of fear and hope and a bitter edge of regret. "Goddess. It's code. It's some sort of data key." 

Then there was the final entry, the day Shepard left for Eden Prime. Kaidan held his finger over the interface, almost afraid to click. Then he took a deep breath, and touched it. 

Shepard looked so tired, tie slightly askew. Behind him, Kaidan could see the SPECTRE offices. "I read that intel your informant gave, K," he said. "And I've included all the data I could from the shard into these vids. This is more of the same. I think it's some sort of key. A key to leaving the Citadel." Shepard put his head in his hands, scrubbed through his hair, then frowned at the camera. 

"You're going to be so mad at me, but you are NOT coming with me on this. Nihlus has been on the Cerberus desk for the last couple of weeks, and there's been some chatter about the dig site as well. They might know something too, something I don't. Something Saren doesn't. Remember, that alien was trying to get that shard OUT of the Leviathan. Maybe... maybe to Eden Prime." 

"But Saren DOES know your intel and Nihlus', since you guys are both diligent little SPECTREs and always log your damn paperwork." He sighed and rubbed his face again. "So. I need to go find out if what's there is connected to this before he does, and through him, that giant bastard lurking in the Graveyard.  And I'm leaving this with you.  If everything goes ok? And I come home, I swear to you, I'll show you these videos, and you can punch me in the face and we'll figure this out together. But for now... I love you. Don't forget, Kaidan. I. Love. You. You make me strong." 

Shepard said those words with such desperation that Kaidan found himself answering back, running his fingertips along the glowing lines of Shepard's holographic cheek. "You should have told me, instead of charging into things alone," he whispered to it, blinking back the tears in his eyes. 

"You ok?" Jacob's voice startled him, a strong brown hand on his shoulder. "I wanted to give you some privacy, but..." 

"I never... NEVER thought he killed the people on that station." Kaidan took a deep breath. "But I... I always thought... a little... he might have been cracking. He pushed himself so hard. Took so much on himself. I want to say that I would have taken this burden with him, I would have helped him interpret it. But _I thought he was going crazy,_ Jacob. I wouldn't have listened, and he _knew_ it. I... I failed him when I should have..." His voice rose with each word and finally, Kaidan slammed his fist into a beam, the full force of his powers behind it. The metal shrieked and twisted under the impact and EDI's voice suddenly came out of nowhere. 

"Please refrain from damaging the ship, Major. We are still three hours out of Omega, and I do not appreciate the discomfort," she chided. 

"Sorry." Kaidan deflated, let Jacob pull him into a surprising hug. 

"Sometimes, we don't get to be the hero we wanna be," he said, letting dark fingers trail against Kaidan's cheek. "Sometimes we have to accept at the end of the day we're human, and we make some stupid mistakes." 

"What do you want from me, Jacob?" Kaidan asked, fighting the urge to lean into the gentle touch. 

"I want you to know that despite everything, you and Shepard did what no other humans have ever done in all of history, you got accepted into the best of the best. You're an inspiration, and I just want you to know that... people believe in you, no matter what kind of crap the council says about either you OR Shepard." Jacob replaced his hand on Kaidan's cheek with his lips, hands catching the other man around the waist. 

"So, if nothing else, remember you guys will always be heroes to our people. To me." Jacob pulled away after the chaste kiss on the cheek, and Kaidan felt an uncomfortable twitch in his pants. 

"We... we're still three hours out of Omega," Kaidan said, abruptly, immediately ashamed. But Jacob's dark eyes had a wicked glint to them. 

"I know how we can pass the time."


	14. Chapter 14

_Even as a SPECTRE, I couldn't get near Eden Prime.  
_

_I tried a couple of times, even as I had Liara and her techs combing through the feeds from the slaughter, looking for something, anything. But every time I found an excuse to go there, some kludged-together intel about Cerberus crossed my desk, or I found myself talking down some damn salarian science freak with a bomb in a university.  
_

_It had been deemed a serious threat location, cut off by barrier fields and patrolled night and day until the council could reach a decision on its fate.  
_

_Saren had lobbied to have the site destroyed, but there was enough of an outcry from the public to make a memorial out of it (an outcry I think the Shadow Broker helped to fuel, although she never would confirm or deny that), to deadlock the council almost indefinitely. A few well-placed acts of attempted... anonymously biotic... terrorism helped to increase the tension and the threat level was finally placed at an omega-type. Even Saren couldn't travel there without six weeks of pre-planning and enough paperwork to bury an elcor.  
_

_If I couldn't get there at the moment, I could at least make sure he couldn't either.  
_

_Flyby drone pics were only the barest of help. The planetoid's dig site was a ruin, and any drone that lingered too long to get a detailed image risked getting flagged by the automated security systems that had been remote-dropped.  
_

_The best image I'd been able to get showed a field of broken spikes amidst the rubble. It made no sense.  
_

_So I sat and tried to read between the lines in Saren's report. How the researchers had been in some sort of daze around an_ _artefact_ _. How that same_ _artefact_ _drove an already unstable Shepard to murder fellow SPECTRE Nihlus, then the archaeologists.  
_

_And how Saren had responded to Nihlus' distress call, arriving too late, except to defend himself against a now feral Vanguard.  
_

_Saren's transport times had been fudged, that was fairly easy to determine. The bastard had arrived at Eden Prime long before Shepard and Nihlus ever did.  
_

_Lying in wait.  
_

_But with what?  
_

_~~  
_

"Final approach to Omega in fifteen, boys and girls." Joker sounded disappointed over the comms. "I've got a nice little berth logged for us, but you are seriously on your own once we dock." 

Garrus was standing at the top of the stairs, giving Kaidan a hard look as he waited. "Took the liberty of contacting an old mutual acquaintance of ours," he said, a sharp edge in his voice. 

"Thanks." Kaidan smoothed the lapels of his coat, hand ghosting over the pocket where Shepard's badge lay. "Is there something else you'd like to say to me, Vakarian?" he added after a moment, the turian's gaze heavy on him. 

"No." Garrus turned away, brushing off a bit of non-existent dust from his sleeve. "I don't think I need to," he sniffed, glancing at Jacob. 

"We played _cards_ , Garrus." Kaidan followed after him, grabbing his arm. "I owe your partner a bottle of hallex and a varren-sausage pizza with extra veg." 

"I don't know what disappoints me more about this conversation." The turian sighed. "The fact that you chose to play poker rather than mate, given the opportunity with a member of your species you clearly find attractive, or that you lost to the shittiest poker player I've ever known." 

"I'm a married man." Kaidan glared up at Garrus. "Just because turians go into heat once a year and only do it in a ritually prepared space so that the spirits can bless your union and, what, keep you from cramping up for the next 24 hours? Doesn't mean that humans are just rutting pyjak." He stabbed a finger at Garrus' chest. 

"You _really_ believe that Shepard is alive and on Omega." Garrus folded his arms with an aggrieved sigh. 

"You do too, or you wouldn't have come with me, Garrus. You and your little infiltration team." Kaidan sagged. "If he's not, he's not. But right now, I can't even go home. I've got nothing else to do." 

The turian's armoured face pulled into something resembling a scowl. "I really need to make new friends." 

"Well, I think you know the most interesting people, Garrus," Kasumi chirped, hanging onto Kaidan's arm. Again, she'd appeared out of nowhere, and Kaidan's heart leapt into his throat like a kid getting spooked in a haunted house. 

"Please don't do that," he said with a weak smile, and she kissed his cheek, pressing a stain of lipstick there. 

"You're positively adorable, SPECTRE, but... I know what it's like to have your heart in the hand of a ghost," she said, letting him go. And just like that, she was gone again. 

It was unnerving. 

There was a heavy thunk as the docking clamps settled onto Normandy's hull and Kaidan found his way to Liara's nest of equipment. "You coming?" 

"Yes," she said without looking at him. "Kaidan... I had Glyph run through all of the university's folkloric databases. And Shepard was right, in  a way. There are some tales, the homeworld stories, but all of them involve following Athame from the darkness, sailing on ships through a tunnel of light into a new world - into the Citadel." She tapped a few buttons, putting her rig to sleep and shook her head. "For some reason, I always thought it was perhaps metaphorical, the Goddess uplifted us all, from the monster-ridden dark of primitive existence to the light of civilisation. But..." 

"But there might be a tunnel, an actual corridor of some sort?  That needs... say, a data key to activate it. A tunnel that leads away from not only the Citadel, but the Graveyard? That there might really be the homeworlds out there?" Kaidan offered and Liara looked hard at him. 

"Yes, exactly," she said, excitement rising. "Kaidan, if this is what Shepard found..." 

"It would mean the Citadel... and the Council... and everything we knew..."  Kaidan faltered. "We have to find him, Liara." 

"Are you two coming, or are you going to stay here and have a tea party with Joker?" Garrus shouted from the airlock. He had a long case thrown over his shoulder and a look that seemed to be filled with a burning desire to shoot something. 

Liara twined her fingers with Kaidan's and nodded. "Let's go find him, Kaidan. Let's bring Shepard home."


	15. Chapter 15

_I had nothing I could go to the Council with, even as Liara's techs pored over the video with the finest of combs. Some fudgy transport records and a video everyone and their mother had seen.  
_

_Nothing.  
_

_But as we sat in our meetings, as I ran my ops, I could feel Saren's eyes on the back of my neck.  
_

_He called me into his office once. And no matter how good a shape you think you're in, sitting across from 7 feet of sharp edged turian is going to make any human feel like dinner.  
_

_"Have you considered your future with the SPECTREs, Alenko?" he asked me, leaning on his talons, watching to see if I was a fish, wriggling away. "You were an academic of sorts before." He waved my file at me. "I'm not saying you haven't been a valuable team member, because you have... but you followed Shepard into this service. I'm sure you could find something at the Temple again, or perhaps Larathos University? You're a gifted biotic and a human of exceptional intelligence. I would... hate for your people to lose one of its betters."  
_

_I'd be lying if I said I hadn't wanted to punch him right in his smug mandibles. I remembered vividly how easy it had been, when all was said and done, to kill Vyrnnus.  
_

_One of his claws dragged across the datapad as he spoke, the viewing screen screeching like a banshee. "Think about it, Major. Dismissed."  
_

_I didn't argue with him. Just got out of my chair before he decided to stick one of those claws in my skin.  
_

_But you didn't live with someone like Shepard for as long as I did, without picking up a little of them, and I stopped in his doorway and turned back. "I think, Commandant, that I'm going to be a SPECTRE till I die."  
_

_(Just like John was)_

~~ 

The Citadel was neat, orderly for the most part. With the exception of the Undercities, the streets and pedways were laid out in a grid that even a particularly stupid varren could navigate, Kaidan thought. 

Omega wasn't like that at all. 

New parts of it grew over the existing ones, tumours spreading across the rocky surface. 

On the outside, the remains of the massive asteroid was studded with scaffolds and platforms. A central tower jutted down from the middle, the gravity well at the heart of Omega, keeping the atmo in place and venting waste and heat into the Graveyard. 

Ramshackle towers rose up into the asteroid's interior, flashing lights and signs lighting every corner. The atmo was thin and tasted like burned tinfoil in the back of his mouth, and the g's were just low enough to be disconcerting. 

Garrus had spent years here, learning the patterns and growth of the city. As Archangel, he'd commanded a network of vigilantes in a effort to make the place even marginally safer. Like most other things on Omega, it eventually failed, and Garrus had been on the losing end of an urban war when Kaidan and Shepard had bailed him out. The rescue had been an unintentional side-effect of their terrorist pursuit, but Garrus Vakarian had taken to Shepard like a krogan to a three-cred all you can eat buffet and bar. 

Without him, they might have never found their quarry. 

Kaidan blinked as he followed Garrus off the Normandy with a scowl. It looked completely different from the last time he'd been there. "Goddess. It's all... changed," he said, lip curling at the stench. "Well, except for the smell." 

Omega always smelled vaguely like it had a corpse rotting under the floorboards. Kaidan was certain there were actually several. 

"I need to secure us an... invitation," Garrus drawled as they jostled through the mess of beggars, travellers and dockworkers. Cargo moved briskly: illicit goods for agri-stations and "indentured" workers for mining camps were pushed along with knock-off fashions and vids bound for the Citadel's Lowcities. Kaidan counted at least forty-seven separate violations of Citadel law by the time they'd reached the gates to Omega proper, none of which seemed to bother the local police lounging about. 

"I'd keep a low profile and stay away from the tourists," the turian bent to whisper to Kaidan. "O-Sec is nothing but a glorified bunch of bounty hunters and corrupt bastards who would shiv their own mothers for a chance to catch you and sell your ass back to Saren." 

Kaidan pulled his hat down low. "Where should I go, then?" he hissed. "It's not like..." 

"I'll take him, boss. You and Jacob and lovely miss Liara can move around without attracting too much attention," Kasumi purred, suddenly hanging off Kaidan's arm. 

"I'll contact you when we're set up." Garrus walked away, ignoring Kaidan's protests. "Stay on the down low." 

Liara covered her mouth, trying to hide the smile and failing. "You'll be fine Kaidan. I understand there are a number of... _interesting_ things to do on Omega." 

And with that, she followed Garrus into the crowds. 

"Alright, Kasumi, I..." Kaidan turned, talking to nothing. "Shit. Son of a volus." 

The infiltrator was gone. 

Kaidan rubbed the heels of his hands over his face and suppressed the desire to purge his barrier right then and there. It would have disrupted Kasumi's cloak long enough for him to find her, but it also would have been like painting a giant target on his back. 

"Fine. You want to play games, go ahead," Kaidan swore and scowled into the crowd. "Goddess, guide my hand," he muttered rotely in a child's prayer, and took off in the first direction he could think of.


	16. Chapter 16

_It's funny, the details your brain files away.  
_

_You don't even know that you've forgotten something, or remembered it, until there's a whiff of a scent, or a sound.  
_

_The pedways in the wards are full of illegal vendors, beggars, and crazies with no access to the extranet. Sometimes you ran into someone who was a little bit of all of them.  
_

_There was one, two blocks downcity and one over from our flat in Zakera, before things took a turn for the better. Bad skin-patch job and a milky-dead freeclinic cybernetic eye. May have been C-sec, or a merc in the Graveyard once upon a time, but we just knew him as the Guntalker, whispering stories to a crudded-up old rifle while he sold junk on the corner near the transit stop.  
_

_He smelled like cheap cigars and gun oil, mixed in with the rank of someone who didn't get a shower but once a month with the hippie, granola-eating siarists in their Downcity Rescue Mission.  
_

_It had started innocently enough, I guess. Shepard got home before me most of the time, his outpost far closer to home than the Temple. I found him, still in his uniform, crouched by the Guntalker, listening to the old fool tell war stories.  
_

_The next week, Shepard bought a rusty spring, no bigger than my hand, that had come off some lumbering old ground transport. Then what might have been a trigger assembly, then... within a few weeks, he had a storage box full of unidentifiable garbage.  
_

_"I'm going to clean these up and paint them, and when we get a bigger place, I want an aquarium. And I'm going to build them a model city to swim through out of this!" Shepard said.  
_

_Turns out some things are deadly no matter how you clean them up and paint them nicely. And after the first few fish died, he boxed up the junk and left it out for the Presidium weekly trash collection.  
_

_Or so I thought._

~~ 

Kaidan was completely lost. 

He was obviously in a marketplace of some sort, condensation drooling in rusty droplets from the atmo ducts that ran overhead. Tarps were spread out in between booths. A mix of species scurried about buying groceries or weapons and there was the angry chitter of small rodents in a cage. The sign was in a pidgin of Citadel Common and batarian dialect, and he wasn't certain if they were pets or for eating. 

A tinny sound system at one booth competed with the station announcements overhead, music that Kaidan's grandparents might have preferred not quite drowning out the angry rodent sounds. 

He said a little thanks to Athame. If he was going to find a crazed prophet preaching the doom of old machines, this was the perfect place. 

He rounded a corner, the smell of a food stall lined with pots of bubbling stew hitting him in the face like a brick wall. But underneath of that was a scent of cheap cigars and gun oil and body odour, and Kaidan wheeled around, nearly knocking an elderly batarian grandmother over. 

He mumbled out a hasty apology, scanning the crowd.  Tucked in a corner behind a lumbering elcor's electronics' booth was a ratty old tarp. Kaidan felt his heart stop as he saw, amongst the rusty garbage, a spring from a lumbering old ground transport, neatly cleaned and painted to look like a fanciful building with flowers at its base. 

"Shepard." He breathed out, scrambling through the crowd. The tarp was unattended, and he caught a glimpse of the old man leading someone away. Tall, that was for certain, but that was the best he could tell beyond the filthy hooded coat the figure wore. 

He bit down the urge to call out. If it was Shepard, calling him out could put him in danger. So Kaidan pushed out, just a tiny bit with his barrier. He knew the feel of Shepard's power as well as his own and he let the ripples run through the crowd. 

The hand on his shoulder snapped his delicate concentration and Kaidan found himself looking down into Kasumi's hooded face. "KASUMI!?" 

"I turn around for one moment and you're gone!" she hissed, prodding him in the chest. "Garrus asked me to.. what's wrong?" she added, seeing that Kaidan wasn't paying a bit of attention to her. 

"I thought..." he said, letting out a frustrated sigh. "Damnit." The Guntalker was gone, the hooded figure was gone. "Excuse me." He turned to the elcor at the next booth. "The old man who sells these things?" 

"Exasperated: Zaeed is bad for business. In All Seriousness: Take his crap, and perhaps he'll go away." The elcor intoned. "With Finality: I have customers to attend to." 

Kaidan picked up the spring and pocketed it. "Have you heard of a mad prophet around here? A human? I could give you a description." 

"Disbelieving: You must be new to Omega. Cannot swing dead varren without hitting crazy people," the elcor replied, ponderously. "Insincerely: I will tell Zaeed that a tourist is looking for him. With Additional Disgust: All you humans look the same. I only recognise Zaeed because he smells worse than the rest of you." 

Kaidan gripped Shepard's badge until the edges dug hard enough into his hand to almost draw blood. Even if he gave the elcor a beat-down, it wouldn't give him what he needed. "With all sarcasm intended: thanks for nothing," he spat. 

Kasumi hooked her arm around Kaidan's. "Well, if you're done arguing with the tank about stinky old men, darling, Garrus called me. Said we had a meet with your asari acquaintance here?" she purred, steering him back towards the docks. "And this time, SPECTRE, I'm not letting you out of my sight." 

"You could have fooled me," Kaidan muttered. "I thought you ditched me." 

"Ditch a handsome man like you?" She sounded affronted. "We're both married to ghosts, Alenko. That doesn't mean I can't appreciate the eye candy." 

"You... mentioned that earlier," Kaidan asked. "What did you mean?" 

She didn't look at him, just dragged him through the crowds. "I used to enjoy a certain profession. With my partner.. Keiji." She sighed. "Long story short, he died, and all I have left of him were the greyboxes he kept in his brain." She tapped her head with a perfectly manicured nail. "But at least I have that." 

"You have a bunch of data, Kasumi." Kaidan pulled away from her as they stepped out into what passed for the frontier city's main plaza. "I know Shepard is alive." 

"The sad thing is, I can't tell if that's touching or delusional," Kasumi said with a shake of her head.


	17. Chapter 17

_With Archangel's help, Shepard and I had caught up to our terrorist on Omega at a dump called The Afterlife.  
_

_It was the kind of joint where they wiped the bar down with the same rag someone had just coughed up a lung on, the bartender hated you, and the strippers hated you more. But no one hated anyone more than the owner, an asari by the name of Aria T'loak.  
_

_The fight had been an ugly one. When you've got an opponent who's cornered, who's got nothing left to live for, innocents get hurt real fast. And even Omega's got its innocents.  
_

_Our terrorist was an older woman.  She was powerful, angry and it broke my heart in more ways than one.  
_

_She'd been at the Temple before me, before Shepard. Before the riot that made them rethink everything. The Temple had broken her in more ways than one, and failed her like it had so many of our people.  
_

_She'd thrown away her name, her existence, to get her revenge. Zero, she called herself. She wore the names and faces of her dead burned into her skin.  
_

_But a SPECTRE's job means having to protect the many at the cost of the one, and she had endangered too many lives. And she didn't plan on going back easy.  
_

_It took both of us to even partially contain her, and together, our powers were greater than any single biotic that ever lived. We'd barely been able to hold her back long enough to evacuate everyone.  
_

_In the end, Garrus put a bullet between her eyes from across the parking lot, and she died with a sad, confused look on her face.  
_

_Shepard drank more that night than I'd thought a human was capable of. I joined him.  But since we'd almost demolished the joint in the process, I'm pretty sure my case of food poisoning wasn't accidental.  
_

~~ 

"You have _got_ to be kidding me," Kaidan said as they stood outside of The (New, Improved) Afterlife. 

The facade was a tacky confection of tortured souls in cheap gold paint reaching up to the flickering neon Goddess (with some very blasphemous flickering neon tits) dancing above them. A scrolling vid across the top of the doorway advertised a wide variety of dancers and drink specials. 

It had taken three over-priced cab rides and a secret handshake to get into a gated alley. But if the renewed Afterlife was a secret, Kaidan thought, it was a badly kept one if the line at the door was any indicator. 

The hopeful patrons glittered in sequinned vinyl and outrageously elaborate hairstyles. He thought he saw an asari wearing a wig woven into the shape of a Ring freighter, tiny blinking lights for the engines and all. A turian in glow-in-the-dark facepaint wore little else. 

Liara, wearing her prim lavender travelling suit, and Jacob in his neat grey coat looked almost ridiculously out of place. Kaidan smoothed his coat and straightened his back. Of course, Kasumi was gone again. "Where the hell is Garrus?" 

"Making sure we've got cover," Jacob said. "He said you and Aria can work things out." 

"Aria," Kaidan said, in almost the same monotone the elcor had used earlier. "Aria T'loak is our information source." He sighed, rubbing his eyes. "She tried to poison me the last time I saw her." 

"The great Incorruptible SPECTRE ate mayonnaise that had been out all day, is what I heard," Liara said, ignoring Kaidan's huff of protest as she glanced up at the sign. "We don't really fit in with the crowd. What's the plan?" 

"We go in the front door." Kaidan said, tipping back his hat. "Liara, I know you've already got Glyph monitoring  this place ... have it log all in and out communications, and just follow my lead." 

"I like a man with confidence." Jacob said with a shrug, and Liara tapped out a quick request for her little VI assistant, and followed them up the stairs, concrete shaking with the insistent throb of bass inside. 

There was a batarian at the door, all muscle, one of his four eyes permanently scarred shut. Kaidan thought he remembered him as a bouncer from Aria's last place. He stepped in front of Kaidan like a an angry wall. "There's a line, monkey." 

Kaidan frowned. "Aria's expecting me," he said softly, making the big alien bend down to hear him. "And I know *you* know she doesn't like to be kept waiting." "I hear that all the time, you little hairy freak," the bouncer growled. "I..." 

Kaidan held him in a stasis field, reaching in with his power and feeling electricity in the batarian's nerves, the motion of the cells in his body. Two more bouncers moved in, and out of the corner of his eye, he was surprised to see two flashes of blue. Liara, in her neat little suit, hands primly folded, was holding one of the bouncers floating above the ground while Jacob slammed the other one into a wall with a biotic push.

Kaidan grinned a little bit and leaned forward. "You know.. I don't like doing this, but listen very carefully. Aria doesn't like to be kept waiting and I have had an incredibly bad day," Kaidan said softly. "I'm going in, and you can thank the Goddess that this wasn't the day I tore you apart on a molecular level." 

He shooed Liara and Jacob in ahead of him as they dropped their targets, then faceplanted the bouncer on the grubby pavement as he strode past. There was a cheer from the crowd at his back, and Kaidan didn't relax until the doors of the Afterlife were closed behind them. 

Kaidan rubbed his forehead, sighing. "I didn't know you were a biotic," he said to Jacob, who had his hand on his holstered gun. "You're about my age... you weren't there?" 

"Not licensed by the Temple." Jacob said with a shrug. "I used to run with Cerberus, remember? They had human-only programs in the beginning. I went there with a bunch of other kids." 

Kaidan winced, remembering Miranda. "I saw what those programs turned into." Jacob's flinch in response told Kaidan a great deal. "I guess, then, you saw them, too." 

"Yeah," was all that Jacob would say as they walked through the dimly lit foyer to the main bar. Kaidan desperately wanted a drink as they passed by a shabby bar swarmed with clubgoers. But he wasn't desperate enough to try anything Aria was peddling. Couches lined the walls, occupied by more of the same they'd seen outside. The air was thick with the herbal-sour scent of creeper and he could feel the pressure of their stares on them. Liara hooked her arm through Kaidan's and hunkered close. 

"Next time we come here, remind me to wear something different," she whispered. 

"Matching vinyl catsuits?" Kaidan patted her hand and she laughed. 

"When we find Shepard, we'll get him one too." She lifted on her toes and gave him a kiss on the cheek and a squeeze on the arm. "This is just... I'm used to getting intel from places like this, but I'm not used to actually being in them." 

"Just don't accept drinks from strangers, and you'll be fine," Kaidan laughed as they pushed open the main doors. 


	18. Chapter 18

_Aria T'loak was tall as krogan, cold as a salarian and had a vindictive streak a mile wide. It was no wonder she'd survived as long as she had on Omega.  
_

_The old Afterlife, as decrepit as it had been, was a staple. A web that drew you in and trapped you there in a haze of cheap booze, lousy dancers and badly-cut drugs. And in the middle of it, like a gorgeous, poisonous spider, was Aria. She didn't give a shit about the booze or the drugs or the dancers. Her real trade was information. "Everyone ends up in the Afterlife" goes the saying on Omega._

_Liara's people dealt with Aria when they had to, but I'd gotten the impression that it wasn't enjoyable for anyone involved.  
_

_I couldn't imagine it was going to be enjoyable for any of us, now.  
_

_~~_

Kaidan wasn't sure what he'd been expecting when they'd pushed through the main doors, another pair of bouncers just giving them wary glances. 

But whatever it had been, what they saw was definitely _not_ it. 

A massive stage dominated the back of the club, most of it draped in glittering white curtains. Secluded booths ringed the three levels rising upwards, and the lower level was a dance floor surrounded by the cheap tables, all of it crowded as the music pounded away. The bars themselves were islands in the flickering, gleaming strobes and neons, a veritable army of bartenders mixing drinks, and waitstaff in costumes that barely qualified for the word gliding through the crowd. 

It danced on a razor-edged line between classier than Kaidan had expected and tackier than any place had a right to be, and he was pondering that when a turian in a fancy tux sidled up to them. He was smaller than Garrus, his face paint a subdued silver against the grey armour of his skin, but the bulge of a gun under his coat was anything but. "Aria's been expecting you and your party, SPECTRE!" he shouted over the music. "She's reserved a booth for you. Great view of the stage." 

"Sure." Kaidan let him lead them through the crowds, to the second tier. 

(He sure didn't lie about the view) Kaidan thought as they settled in to the thick seats. But then the flashing lights dimmed and the music died down, sending people scurrying to their seats. 

Kaidan rested his hand on the Paladin under his coat, and saw Jacob do the same. "Be on guard," he whispered to Liara, as the curtain rose on the stage before them. 

The crowd went wild as spotlights swung across the room, the curtains went up and there was Aria T'loak, striding out into the spotlight. 

She was as tall as Kaidan remembered, her blue skin sparkling in the light. She wore a gown that seemed made entirely of white ribbons and strands of pearls, caught at her throat. Every movement exposed a flash of blue, and threatened to show off everything if she turned just the wrong way. 

"I'd heard she'd been working on her... appearance," Liara said with a little sniff, taking a drink from a barely clad human girl. 

"You really don't like her, do you?" Kaidan asked, taking his own drink and setting it down before the temptation to try it became too great. 

"I dislike _everything_ about this place. Aria's just a part of the landscape." Liara said in a tone that shut down anything else Kaidan might have wanted to ask. But then the music swelled, and Aria took a hold of a microphone hovering nearby. 

"Falling in love again. Never wanted to..." Aria half-spoke, half-sang in a voice that sounded like a trash compactor full of rocks. But the crowd was going wild, cheering. 

Kaidan sniffed his drink to see if everyone was possibly hallucinating, as Aria continued. 

"What I am I to do? I can't help it... Love..." she breathed into the microphone as smaller stages rose up around her. It was a mix of species, humans and lizard-like drell, asari and even one pointy-headed vorcha, giant staring red eyes at complete odds with the neat tuxedoes they all wore. The audience screamed and Kaidan had a feeling this was a regular occurrence. 

"Love has always been my game, play it how I may," Aria half-sang. "I was... made that way. I can't help it..." She caressed the cheek of a handsome human man. He was tall as she was, built like a tank, and Kaidan narrowed his eyes. Scars peppered his face and there was something in the confidence with which he moved, twirling around a pole as Aria crooned to him. 

A confidence in the way they all moved that said to him less "dancers" and more "fighters." 

"Men... and ladies... cluster to me like moths round a flame..." Aria drew the word out, dragging her finger down the man's tuxedo. It burned away at her touch, some sort of tiny laser cutter in her rings, and the crowd stood as one, shouting as the suit fell away. 

He was even bigger than Kaidan had estimated. A tiny scrap of black fabric between the polished pale brown of his thighs was all that stood between him and full-on nudity. Kaidan clenched down on his hand, feeling the bite of his wedding ring into his finger, but he must have made some sort of strangled little sound because Jacob nudged him gently. "We didn't have to play cards before, you know." 

"Shh." Kaidan elbowed him. 

"And if their wings burn, I know, I AM NOT TO BLAME!" Aria threw her hands up as a shower of sparklers erupted from the stage. The crowd surged forward onto the dance floor with cheers. Tuxedos fluttered away like ash and she twirled between an iridescent green drell and the human, pausing to make very clear eye contact with Kaidan. "I can't help it," she growled into the mic, "If you get burned... I can't help it." 

She blew a kiss at the crowd. "AND WELCOME TO AFTERLIFE!"  The thumping bass picked up again, as the dancers practically made love to the gleaming poles rising up. The drell and the big human led Aria off the stage, the crowd parting as one for her. 

Eventually, she sat down in a swirl of pearls and silk across from Kaidan, the drell draping himself across the back of her seat with the same liquid grace as Aria's ribbons. The human sat beside her, watching Kaidan with dark eyes full of curiosity. "Kaidan Alenko," she said with a quirk of her brow. "You're looking... capable." 

"Been a while, Aria." Kaidan sat back. 

"I sent flowers on the anniversary of Shepard's death. I hope you liked them." She took a sip of a drink that appeared for her. "I thought you could use the... cheering up, SPECTRE." 

"I... _appreciated_ the gift," Kaidan said, reaching into his pocket. Aria's companions tensed, ever so slightly, and he set the painted spring on the table between them. 

"It's lovely, Alenko. I'll put it on the shelf next to my limited edition hand painted seasonal krogan figurines," Aria said with a little curl of her lip. 

"Aria..." he started, and she put up her hand.

"Answer me this, Alenko. Archangel's somewhere up in my rafters with a bead on my head, isn't he?" she asked. 

Kaidan shrugged broadly. "Probably." 

"Do you know why I let you and your playmates keep your weapons when you came into my house, SPECTRE?" She regarded her drink, pale eyes watching Kaidan over the rim of the glass. 

"Because I'm as strong a biotic as you are, Aria. Weapon's just a backup. And I suspect your dancers are more than just for show, as are my friends. We're both adult enough to talk this out without major property damage." Kaidan leaned forward and tapped the spring. "Listen, Aria. I really don't have time for games. Shepard..." 

"Games are all we have, Major Alenko." She interrupted him, narrowing her eyes. "When was the last time you slept? Or ate a proper meal for that matter?" 

Kaidan was taken aback. "I... sometime yesterday, I..." He paused, remembering waking up in Garrus' safehouse. Then his stomach growled. 

"My Jimmy here will see you're taken care of, Alenko. We can discuss your crap taste in souvenirs after you've eaten something, and I'll have the kitchens hold the mayo this time." Aria paused with an evil smile, then continued. "The circles under your eyes are bothering me." She stood with a rustle of fabric, the drell moving with her. "Archangel can stay up in the rafters all night for all I care. His stupid turian ass can starve." She turned and looked pointedly at Liara. "And it's good to see you again, little sister. You never call, never write..." 

When Liara only fumed silently, Aria laughed unpleasantly. "We'll talk soon, Alenko. Enjoy the meal." 

The way she looked at "Jimmy", Kaidan was certain she was talking about more than dinner. 


	19. Chapter 19

_I suppose I'd considered myself married to Shepard from the moment he'd accepted my teenage proposal, the two of us huddled in a utility closet as I wiped the blood from his face.  
_

_He was already listed on my Proctor's paperwork as next-of-kin ahead of my own parents, and we'd made the arrangements to file the necessary legal forms as soon as he graduated from the C-Sec academy.  
_

_Every day, on my way to teach, I passed through the Temple courtyards, the light of the nebula throwing violet-skewed rainbows across the polished floor, breezes from the air system trembling the flowering trees and sending petals twirling away.  
_

_And there was always some happy couple, waiting to have their union blessed in the eyes of Athame. The Temple long kept a photographer and a priestess on the payroll just for those occasions. Sure you could get married in one of the other shrines throughout the Citadel, or even just file the paperwork with your local Ward government.  
_

_But the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to see Shepard here, in this light, with petals in his hair, the man the Matriarchs never expected him to become.  
_

_That night, in our crap loft, (the sounds of the vorcha pairbond on the floor below us having another argument that would end with something exploding and one of them spending the night sleeping on the fire escape, howling some nerve-wringing song of apology all night) one week before Shepard's graduation from the Academy, I got down on my knees before him and told him my plan.  
_

_I'd never seen him speechless before. He just blinked those bright eyes at me, then started to laugh. He laughed until he was wheezing and I was furious.  
_

_When Shepard calmed down enough to actually talk again, he fished a box out of his pocket. "I've been saving some from my extra shifts for these," he said with that smile that made me want to punch him and kiss him all at once. "It's like we've always danced together." And he showed me the rings. Dull grey and cheap as hell, recycled hull plating. One word engraved on the surface of each.  
_

_Two weeks later, Shepard stood across from me in his C-Sec formal uniform, petals in his hair and violet-skewed rainbows lighting the edges of his face, and said, "I do. Always."  
_

_~~_

Kaidan didn't realise how hungry he was until Aria's servers brought out tray of food. Real meats and veg, the kind he'd gotten on the Presidium. Definitely not the sort of food you normally saw in a place like Omega.

And a small pot of mayonnaise on the side.

"Kaidan, you should eat. You're running on fumes." Liara nudged him. "Aria's not going to poison us," she added with a sigh.

"Should I ask?" he said, taking a bite of the cooked meat that then turned into several minutes of shovelling food into his mouth. He only paused when he noticed that Liara, Jacob AND Aria's dancer friend were all staring at him. "Sorry."

Jimmy leaned across the table to wipe the corner of Kaidan's mouth with his thumb. "You got a healthy appetite," he said with a smirk, licking his thumb in a way that made Kaidan want to lick it too.

Jacob snorted and Liara waited a beat, looking him over before glancing back at Kaidan. "No. You shouldn't ask. At least not now."

"Hey, don't mind me, Doc." Jimmy lounged back, perfectly at ease. His big body was covered with elaborate black tattoos that seemed to ripple and move in the flashing lights of the club. "Doctor T'Soni, head of the folklore and history at Larathos University, I mean. And Jacob Taylor, Archangel's chief knight.  And SPECTRE Major Kaidan Alenko. Aria gave me the short-form infodump on all of ya, y'know, so I could make your visit to Omega a more personalised experience." He flashed a toothy grin as he sketched a little bow.

"That experience should probably involving you putting on pants, man." Jacob said with a quirk of an eyebrow. "The Major here's a married man."

"And you're jealous of the competition?" Jimmy smirked, getting up with a grace a man his size shouldn't have had. "Come on, Major. It's a slow song, one dance with me, and I'll put some pants on afterwards."

Kaidan looked down at the wasteland he'd left of the dinner tray, then nodded. "I think I'd like that." He took off his overcoat and folded it carefully, shrugging at Liara's questioning gaze. "Does Aria think this will embarrass me?" He asked as Jimmy led him onto the dance floor, the big man clearly enjoying the eyes on them.

The dancer's hands slid down Kaidan's back, pulling him close. "Aria thinks you have some problematic companions," he murmured into a kiss. "And you've brought more trouble here than you realise."

"Who?" Kaidan let his own hands travel across the broad stretch of Jimmy's back, letting the big man dip him, then sweep him close again.

"Dunno. Not yet. But some ships docked right around the time you guys brought that hunk of crap Normandy in. I'd guess you've got Cerberus and SPECTRE problems at the very least."

"Why are you telling me this?" Kaidan scowled. "Aria's not usually so forthcoming."

"Who do you think leaked the info to the Shadow Broker? It wasn't Aria." Jimmy whispered as the song ended. "Someone wanted you to come here and find him for them. She wants to know who, as much as you should." He pushed back from Kaidan and added, louder, "And I'm gonna go put some pants on before I offend your modesty any further, Major." He bowed low, accepting a few credit chits from some appreciative onlookers before vanishing into the crowd. "I'll be back to collect you in a bit," he added over one broad shoulder with a wink.

Kaidan watched him go, then looked back at Liara and Jacob.

Cerberus was no more welcome on Omega than SPECTREs were as a rule, he thought. The intel he'd gotten from his time on the Cerberus desk at HQ had shown that they'd had better luck setting up cells on mining and agri-satellites throughout the Ring than on Omega itself - humans didn't make up enough of the population to give agitators a solid foothold. And SPECTRE informants had fairly short lifespan in a place where Citadel authority was sneered at.

The Shadow Broker's people, on the other hand, played all the angles.

Then there was the fact he didn't know anything about Jacob. Less about Kasumi. And EDI listened in to everything on Joker's ship.

Kaidan gritted his teeth as he strode back to the booth. He didn't like the idea that he'd been set up all along. Liked the idea that he'd foolishly shown all of Shepard's precious data to a traitor even less.

But he couldn't be sure, and he didn't want it be true.

"You look like you didn't enjoy that dance very much." Jacob was nibbling on some greens when Kaidan sat back down, across from them.

"I didn't want Aria to think I was turning down her hospitality," he answered. "He'll be back with more information. Liara..."

"I'm sorry I never told you about Aria, Kaidan..." she said, dabbing at her mouth with a napkin. "My... prodigal big sister. We haven't been on good terms for a very long time, and we frequently have very... different interests at heart." She sighed. "And, well, she told me if she ever caught me on Omega, she'd put a bullet between my eyes," Liara added sadly.

Kaidan found he believed her.

She shook her head, ruefully. "But, on the bright side, I did receive a ping from Glyph while you were out on the dance floor with that man."

Kaidan leaned forward. "What was it?"

"A call placed to a clinic, shortly after Aria left us. I'm trying to track the location, but Omega's a maze. it's somewhere downcity," Liara said. "Call was coded, only lasted a few seconds, but I think it was a warning. She knows where Shepard is, Kaidan."

"We'll see. See if Glyph can figure out where that clinic is." Kaidan grabbed his coat, the weight of Shepard's badge reassuring in the pocket. "I need to check something. Meet me outside." He could feel the questioning looks on his back as he swept out of the booth, Liara's shout to him cut off as he quickly strode across the club in the direction Jimmy had gone. He grabbed Garrus' last encrypted call to him on his omnitool and tapped his earpiece. "Garrus. Where are you?"

"In a state of annoyance over not being able to shoot anyone," the turian drawled in his ear. "What's up?"

"Medical clinics, Omega, talk to me," Kaidan said as he moved through the press of dancers. "You spent years getting your ugly face shot at here, you must know a few."

"For the rich or the poor?" Garrus sounded as interested as Kaidan had ever heard him.

"Poor, defensible..."  He paused, thinking of the old Guntalker and his hooded friend. "Someplace an old merc would be comfortable taking someone."

"Mordin Solus," Garrus said immediately. "That crazy old salarian bastard in the Depths. Heard he'd been a SPECTRE or a merc himself once. Gang tried to shake him down once, he killed them all, hung their bodies in one of the tunnels with a very polite note stapled to their heads." He sounded positively  impressed. "He's no fan of O-Sec either. We worked together a couple of times, had some crossover in the enemies department."

"How do I find him?" Kaidan smoothed the brim of his hat, squinting up at the lights.

"You don't," Garrus said. "Doc Solus finds you."


	20. Chapter 20

_Omega's got almost three-quarters of the population of the Citadel, but half the space, I'd read once.  
_

_The port and the main "levels" were built around the asteroid, but once you got past that, it was a maze of mining tunnels, vertical drops and unexpected chasms with rickety bridges for the crossing.  
_

_There was no transit in Omega's innards. You hoofed it, or you took a shabby pedicab pulled by some vorcha or human looking to make a few bucks.  
_

_Anything of value had been mined out of it centuries ago, but the population had kept growing. It was a constant area of concern for the C-Sec because you could cook a freighter-hold's worth of hallex for a few measly credits in a kitchen lab, and sell it on the Citadel for ten times the price.  
_

_At least, it was a concern when the kickbacks and bribes weren't being properly paid._

_Omega's own security forces, colloquially known as "O-Sec," were little more than collective enforcers for the drug lords, mobsters and lowlifes who effectively made up Omega's ruling caste.  
_

_The upside for me and the other SPECTREs was that they didn't like competition, which made it harder for groups like Cerberus to set up shop, and didn't have any problem dropping the credits to call us with a tip when there was a problem they didn't want to handle, like the Zero case, as long as we didn't stick around.  
_

_Garrus had been right earlier, though. As quick as O-Sec had been to call the SPECTREs, they'd be equally quick to call them about me.  
_

_I just had to hope they'd be less choosy about me being dead or alive._

~~ 

"This is the worst plan I've ever heard," Garrus said. "You *want* them to see you?" 

"I want them to _shoot_ at me. If I can't find this Doc Solus, I'll make him want to find me." Kaidan found Afterlife's kitchen entrance, and dodged the servers and affronted cooks as he made his way to the service doors. "I need you to watch my back and make sure I don't get killed." 

"You're ditching Liara and Jacob," Garrus pointed out over the comm. 

"I know. Garrus, how well do you know him?" Kaidan asked as he finally escaped the sweltering kitchen into the relative cool of the filthy alley behind the club. 

"Well enough. We helped each other out of a jam after I got to the Citadel. He left Cerberus because he doesn't care for extremists, and he's been a good asset." Garrus sounded like he was moving, scrambling out of his perch.  "And before you ask, I met Kasumi when she was in the process of robbing me blind. I offered her a better deal. Why?" 

"It's been implied to me that we had some hangers-on when we got here, and that someone in our little travelling group might be the reason for that." Kaidan stepped over a drunken batarian pissing himself. 

"And you're trusting me with this information because?" the turian grunted. There was a sound of metal scraping, and Kaidan looked up to see Garrus clambering out of a vent high above. 

"Because Shepard trusted you, and that's going to have to do for now," Kaidan sighed as Garrus dropped the case to his sniper rifle down to him. "I got so caught up in the possibility that he was alive, I've been careless." 

Garrus narrowed his eyes. "It's understandable. The two of you were nauseating togethe," he muttered. "But to love someone like that? Well, let's just say I can see where your thinking might be clouded." 

"How long do you think we have?" Kaidan peered out of the alley's entrance to the crowded plaza beyond. 

"Not long. Jacob and Liara are both smart. If one of them is playing a game, they're not going to want to lose you. And I haven't heard from Kasumi in an hour." Garrus rubbed his mandibles. "Did I mention this is a stupid plan, Kaidan? Get O-Sec to shoot you, then hope you don't die of blood loss or get murdered as you wander the depths, hoping Solus will take pity on you?" 

"I just said I want them to shoot _at_ me." Kaidan took his hat off and turned it over in his fingers. "You're going to be the one to actually shoot me. I trust you not to kill me." He popped the hat on Garrus' head and looked at it appraisingly. "And don't mess up my hat." 

"You know, I always thought you were the more boring of the pair. Clearly, you and Shepard were always equally crazy," Garrus said, shaking his head. "Fine, hurry up and go be an idiot." 

It wasn't that Kaidan had _always_ been as crazy as Shepard, he thought. It was just that you didn't live with _Shepard the Indestructible_ as long as he had without picking up a few habits. He swiped a bottle of vile-smelling liquor off the passed-out batarian in the alleyway and shoved his way into the square. 

There were uniforms loitering at the stalls and street corners, and Kaidan took a moment to orient himself in the direction he hoped led down into the Depths. A quick scan of the square showed a knot of krogan, young and ill-tempered, standing near a drink vendor. A few O-Sec officers were close by, ignoring them in the hopes they'd go away. 

(Perfect.) Kaidan thought, and took a swig of the rotgut he'd lifted from the bum. It tasted worse than anything he'd ever had before, and he stumbled into one of the krogan, with enough of a biotic push behind it to send him crashing into the drinks stand. 

There was a roar of laughter from his friends and Kaidan smashed the bottle into another one's face. 

Within a few seconds, the busy plaza turned into chaos. The officers shouted into their comms and Kaidan barely dodged a charging krogan, sending him flying into another group of security with the kick of a shockwave that shook the whole square. 

The shockwave had a secondary effect that Kaidan had been hoping for; it drove the passerby away, surging back towards the Afterlife and surrounding side streets. A shot from an overzealous officer whizzed past his ear and Kaidan slammed him into a wall, sliding across the hood of a nearby cargo hauler. (Come on Garrus, any time now, any...) he thought, right as a high-velocity round took him clean through the meat of the shoulder. 

Somewhere, the krogan roared in rage and Kaidan gritted his teeth against the searing pain in his arm. 

He had to give the turian credit. It hurt like hell but he could tell it was a nice clean through and through. Garrus had missed bone and major blood vessels, and trying to staunch the blood with his barrier, Kaidan promised himself he'd never call Garrus ugly again, just for the perfection of the shot. 

He could hear the security officers shouting, and Kaidan kicked up one last shockwave, hurtling the truck towards the cops, wiping out a cluster of nearby stands and raining a cloud of debris down on them. (Goddess, guide my hand) he prayed again, and stumbled through the chaos into the belly of Omega.


	21. Chapter 21

_I'm pretty sure you never forget the first time you were shot.  
_

_The movies make it look like it's something that either kills you instantly, or that the hero shrugs off with a grunt and soldiers on. It turns out there's a whole big swathe of middle ground in between, and that middle ground hurts.  
_

_Hurts A LOT.  
_

_SPECTREs get shot at pretty frequently - occupational hazard - but I'd been lucky till we'd gone after a corrupt district rep from Shalta Ward. Tough old turian with a small army of "personal guards." I went after the big fish while Shepard cleaned up the enforcers.  
_

_I got careless, dumping my barrier to knock him off his feet without killing him, and then moving in to arrest him before I was sure he was out.  
_

_Turned out the old bastard had a hand cannon hidden in his coat and blasted a chunk out of my side. It hurt like being stabbed (which I had), like being burnt (also which I had at that point) and being hit by warp (which thankfully I'd avoided but I'd done it to other people enough times to guess) all at once and then probably slightly worse.  
_

_I remember collapsing back, my hand coming away from my side, bright red. My vision was going grey and the pain was white hot. And then next thing I knew there was a flash of blue and Shepard was there. It was a miracle our backup arrived before he was able to finish beating the councilman's head into a thin, gritty paste.  
_

_Later he said to me, as I lay in the hospital bed watching re-runs, "Sometimes, I don't know whether I want to kiss you, punch you in the face, or both."  
_

_I told him I knew the feeling._

~~ 

It said something about Omega that the cops didn't try to follow Kaidan into the Depths. 

He guessed they would  look for his body later, after he'd either bled out or been done in by the krogan, as he tried to run through the rough-hewn maze of the Depths. It wasn't as crowded as the Undercities on the Citadel, he thought at first, before realising that there were eyes on him from every dim-lit window and doorway. 

He was an outsider, with a pack of angry krogan tearing after him, and the locals were just waiting for the show. 

The one he'd smashed in the face made a charge towards him, and Kaidan grabbed him with a pull, smashing the krogan's face into the pavement hard enough to leave a crater. In his earpiece, he could hear Garrus yelling at him but it sounded hollow, like he was yelling into an empty pressure helmet. 

Kaidan lost track of his steps, no amount of mental training the Temple could beat into him able to fully fend off the rising effect of shock from the blood loss and pain. Finally he leaned against a building and sagged to the grimy sidewalk below, leaving a smear of blood in his wake. (Garrus was right. This was _such_ a stupid plan.) 

The remaining krogan circled him with nasty smiles pulling across their reptilian faces. One cracked his knuckles and Kaidan closed his eyes, feeling the clammy sweat soaking through his clothes with the blood. He put his hand in his pocket and closed it around Shepard's badge, cool and smooth and heavy. 

(I don't find Doctor Solus, he finds me.) Kaidan repeated to himself. (Please, Goddess. If Shepard's alive, let this work.) He paused, leaning his head back against the wall. "And if he's really dead, let's just end this now. I'm tired." 

He didn't expect the blinding flash, even through closed eyes, the ground tearing up around them. Weakly, Kaidan blinked against the spots dancing in his vision at the shadowy figure on one knee between him and what remained of the krogan. His fist was at the centre of the impact crater and the air around it hissed with raw biotic power. But the pavement wasn't simply cratered in front of them, it had been vaporised, the air full of choking dust. 

"Shepard," he whispered, unable to hear himself properly through the ringing in his ears. Then someone jerked him upright, and Kaidan flailed for a moment, struggling. "Goddamn fools. Goddamn frog," a man said very far away, over and over, interspersed with nonsense words and cursing. There was the smell of cheap cigars and gun oil and bad, bad body odour. 

"Guntalker," Kaidan rasped as the man threw him over his shoulder like a sack of root veg. 

"Shaddup," the old man said, carrying him with surprising ease. "Goddamn Solomon made me come get you for the goddamn frog." 

"That's nice," Kaidan heard himself say as he passed out, Garrus still yelling in his ear. 

There was no one yelling anything when he woke with a start, medigel cool and sticky on his shoulder and a thick haze of painkillers over his senses. Kaidan blinked muzzily a few times, then focused on the elderly salarian sitting across from him, holding Shepard's badge in his long fingers. 

"Wake up quicker than expected. Good, good," he said briskly, getting up and placing the badge in Kaidan's hands. "Went to a lot of trouble to make yourself a target, SPECTRE. Your friend is an excellent shot, by the way." 

"You know it wasn't O-Sec?" Kaidan tried to sit up, found the task too difficult, then flopped back down on the cot. His bloody shirt and coat were draped over a nearby chair. 

"O-Sec uses shredder rounds. Tear a target up from the inside," Solus sniffed. "Problematic for healing. You? High-velocity non-frag round. Clean through and through, minimal damage, for any given value of 'minimal.'" He made a set of air quotes. 

"I had to see you, and this was my best shot." Kaidan laughed weakly at the pun. "Doctor..." 

"Know why you're here, can't help you." He blinked slowly, withered lips pursing. "Can't trust you're not with Saren. Should just kill you," Solus pondered out loud. "Would be easier." 

"If you know who I am, then you know why I'm here." Kaidan forced himself upright this time. "Saren is trying to have me killed, Cerberus is trying to have me killed and the only person I can possibly trust is the damn turian I had SHOOT ME." His voice rose, and Kaidan tried to summon a wave of biotics to punctuate his angry words. A glass on a nearby table rattled feebly then fell over, as if in protest. 

Then, nothing.

Kaidan reached around to feel the back of his neck. "You took my amp." 

"SPECTRE. Powerful biotic, unknown intentions." Doctor Solus sounded as if he was talking to a singularly stupid child. "Of _course_ take biotic amp." 

"I... for two years I've been trying to prove that my husband didn't murder an entire installation of researchers, that Saren Arterius was somehow behind it. Behind... whatever this bunch of data is that I don't understand but people are willing to kill for." Kaidan clenched his fist around Shepard's badge. "Saren's had me branded a murderer and I got a lead that Shepard might actually be alive and here on Omega. I don't care if I have to spend the rest of my life living in this shithole - I don't care if you shoot me in the fucking head, Doctor - if I can just find out the truth, just once." 

"Truth is dead gods dreaming in the dark," a rough voice said from the shadows. "Truth is one thousand, one hundred and eighty three forgotten roads in the spaces between the stars." 

"Solomon." Doctor Solus turned to the figure. "Told you to remain away." 

"Shepard." The badge dropped from Kaidan's fingers to the thin blanket covering him. "Shepard?" 

"We knew a man once. Eyes like whiskey. Like the sun of a world we've seen only in memories. Incorruptible." The man stepped forward slowly. Straggly bronze-brown beard, tattered strips of fabric across the familiar planes of a once-handsome face covering his eyes. The hooded coat was too big and he hunched within it, the Shepard confidence Kaidan had always known, gone. It was like they were children again, huddled in that supply closet. Long fingers worked nervously, one circled by a dull grey band of metal. "He made me strong." 

"We danced together, always," Kaidan said very carefully, words threatening to choke in his throat. "You never came home." 

"Always." Solomon... _Shepard_ said softly. A trembling hand reached for Kaidan and he reached back, fingertips just brushing. "One thousand, one hundred and eighty three forgotten roads, none of them back to Kaidan. Not safe." The hand fell away. "Not safe." he repeated, agitated. "Why are you here?" 


	22. Chapter 22

_For all intents and purposes, Shepard and I had grown up together. We had grown into each other.  
_

_In a firefight, we were part of the same body. Knew where the other was like a left and right hand would know.  I'd mapped every square inch of his skin with my lips and my hands, and he'd done the same with me.  
_

_His scent was burned into mine, and his expressions...  
_

_People saw Shepard with usually two faces. If you were a criminal, it was the grim face of Shepard the Indestructible. The implacable, unstoppable SPECTRE who would ruin your day. Everyone else saw that infuriating grin.  
_

_Everyone but me.  
_

_I saw him hollowed out and exhausted. Petulant when he didn't get what he wanted. Boneless like a cat after we made love, and nearly purring. I saw him with circles under his eyes and I saw him smile like a child when he painted rusty metal to look like buildings and flowers for his fish to swim through. And I knew the look on his face now. The language of the way his body swayed and fidgeted.  
_

_He was afraid._

~~

"I came for you," Kaidan said gently, still reaching out. "For two years, I thought you were dead, John."

Shepard shook his head. "We were dead. But not dead. Drifting in the dark and the cold and..." One hand clutched at the baggy coat, and Doctor Solus guided him to a chair. "Never wanted you to see this."

"Doctor?" Kaidan's gaze never left Shepard. He was shaking under Solus' gentle hand.

"Freighter 'Solomon Gunn' found body floating in space drifting. Brought in to see if salvage from corpse," the salarian said, pouring cups of some bitter-scented tea. "Zaeed was travelling here aboard."

"Zaeed?" Kaidan took the offered cup and winced at the taste.

"Goddamn assholes," the Guntalker said from a corner of the room. He'd been so quiet, Kaidan hadn't even noticed he was there. "They thought he was dead, but he wasn't." He made a nasty laugh. "I kept him safe, I did."

"Was SPECTRE once, just like you.  Knew for some time, Saren... not right." Solus said, steadying the cup in Shepard's hand. "Something dark, unsettling. Fled to Omega." He paused. "Cowardly."

"Not cowardly. Smart." Kaidan sighed, setting the cup down. He slid off the bed, legs still wobbly. Very slowly, he crept to Shepard's side. "John, please. I watched all of your vids." He placed his hand on the other man's knee and gave it a small squeeze. "I know about the dreams, about the aliens you say brought our ancestors here. I know all the data and the words you tried to transcribe."

One of Shepard's hands closed over his. "One thousand, one hundred and eighty three roads home. We have the maps. We left the key to the conduit with you, for safekeeping."

"We?" Kaidan asked, feeling Shepard's hand tighten over his.

"The Collectors were sent out by the Old Gods to gather samples of different species. To preserve them in a sort of... menagerie," Shepard said quickly, as if words were coming to him that he needed to repeat before he forgot them again.

"To preserve them even as their planets were harvested, no... _reaped_... of all life... to feed them. The Old Gods. The monsters in the dark." His hand twitched on Kaidan's. "The Citadel... the Graveyard isn't just a ring, it's a sphere filled with leftover planetary debris from all the worlds destroyed building it. To keep us in. But something happened, a long time ago. And others stopped coming here. Only the Leviathan was left. And it fell asleep, forgot what it was doing."

"But the collectors? They kept... collecting?" Kaidan watched Shepard's bandaged face.

"Species die off. Like the aquarium. Do you remember the aquarium?" Shepard asked hopefully. A faint smile quirked his lips as Kaidan nodded and squeezed his hand. "Fish die off, get new fish. Soon, it's like they were there all along. Species would die off, the Collectors would recycle them in the plants... go get new ones in the hopes the God would wake again and tell them what else to do. Eventually... eventually they had a war between themselves."

"They killed each other off in a civil war." Kaidan followed the thought.

"No one left to maintain the Citadel except automated systems," Solus supplied. "Have been attempting to interpret Solomon's data. Impossible to predict how long those systems will continue to run without maintenance."

"Before he tried to kill me, Jondam Bau said something about the Citadel needing to be preserved." Kaidan sat back on his heels. "Shepard, what happened on Eden Prime? What the hell is Saren planning?" He gripped Shepard's hand tightly. "John, we're SPECTREs, we swore an _oath_ to protect the people of the Citadel."

"The shard was a part of something larger. A cache of data on Eden Prime." Shepard rocked in his seat, clutching his coat harder. "Synthetic brains sleeping, an army. Saren woke the army." Feebly, he shook his head in some attempt to make whatever he was seeing behind his bandaged eyes go away. "Dragon's teeth, jutting up from the ground. Sharp, cutting away life. They were already dead when we got there, changing into husks, like the ghosts in the Leviathan. Like them, but more deadly, different."

Long fingers twitched and he shook his head again. "Shepard... Nihlus, we fought them, but we couldn't save anyone," he said sadly. "Saren took the army, killed Nihlus. Tried to take us, so we couldn't tell the ways home. But we were already bonding."

A weak, unhappy smile tugged at Shepard's mouth. "There was a hole, Kaidan." He said as he pulled at his coat. "Shepard... I... spaced our... myself. To protect Legion." Shepard paused, trembling. "There was a hole. From Saren. We bonded with Shepard to protect him, us."

"Is Legion the maps?" Kaidan fought to keep his voice still.

"Our name is Legion, for we are many. Synthetic compilation of the memories of one thousand, one hundred and eighty three species brought to the citadel over the millennia, and the routes of their travels. Saren would have us destroyed.  And our... my name is John Shepard. We trusted biotics and armour would protect us from vacuum long enough to make it back to the shuttle port from the outside."  Very slowly, he unfastened his coat. A thin shirt lie beneath, and through the fabric, Kaidan could see a faint web of orange light.

"But then there was a hole," he repeated. "Saren shot us. John Shepard trying to save Legion, Legion trying to save Shepard. A consensus was reached." Hesitantly, Shepard reached for the bandages on his face. "Kaidan," he said in a small, miserable voice.

There was a tiny ding on Kaidan's omnitool, and he ignored it. "It's ok, John. It doesn't matter." He rested his fingertips on the back of Shepard's hand. "Always, remember?"

"Always." Shepard pulled the bandages away. His handsome face was a latticework of tiny scars, the same web of orange light flickering beneath them. In the depths of his blue eyes were points of red light, shifting as he blinked. "I don't know if I'm real anymore, Kaidan. There's so much... information. So much more than even before."

"It's ok,." Kaidan said, kissing Shepard's hand. His omnitool dinged again, and he shook his head. "You're real enough for me."

 

art by [alishatorn](http://alishatorn.tumblr.com/post/33639984404/art-masterpost-shadow-in-the-stars-based-on-and)


	23. Chapter 23

_You could get cybernetics at every level of medical care on the Citadel - from cheap, plasticky replacements like Zaeed's eye at a freeclinic, to bespoke works of art that would be fitted at the finest hospitals on the Presidium.  
_

_But, I had never, **ever**_ _seen anything like this before.  
_

_The scars traced fractal patterns over Shepard's skin, vanishing up into his hairline and the scruff of his beard, only to re-emerge like trailing vines down his throat. The orange light made it seem as if fire was dancing just below the surface of his flesh.  
_

_It was beautiful, and horrifying all at once. There were new creases around his eyes, with those haunting red points of light shifting behind them. Very tentatively, he leaned his face into my hand as I reached to touch them.  
_

_A part of me felt ill, a small wave of nausea at the feel of his broken skin beneath my palm and the tingling warmth rising from it. A part of me was **furious**_ _that he had kept away, preferring to hole up in this dump rather than let me know he was alive.  
_

_But I couldn't pull my hand away, not as Shepard's eyes closed and he buried his face against it. A different sort of warmth, then. Hot and wet and his shoulders shook as he slid off the chair into my arms.  
_

_The old salarian was saying something about how the integration had been an uphill fight for both Shepard and the synthetic. How he'd taken the name from the freighter that had found him, perhaps because he wasn't ready to be John Shepard again.  
_

_It didn't matter. None of it mattered as I tried to blink away my own tears, rocking him gently, his arms tight around me. I found myself humming the little tune he'd programmed into our VI so long ago, and he held onto me like I was the only thing keeping him from drifting away into the cold and dark of space.  
_

_We were together again.  
_

_And I was never going to let him go.  
_

~~ 

"KAIDAN!" Liara's voice was sudden and sharp in his ear, the Shadow Broker's override passing the call to his earpiece. "Are you there?" She sounded panicked, desperate. 

One arm still clutching Shepard to him, Kaidan tapped it. "Liara, what's going on?" Out of the corner of his eye he saw the Guntalker and the doctor both tense. 

"Thank the Goddess," she gasped, catching her breath. "I've been searching for you, everything's gone terribly wrong!" Liara broke into a sob at the end. 

"Calm down and tell me what happened." Kaidan asked, letting Shepard sit back finally, their hands still touching. His miserable expression was quickly reordering itself, and within moments was the familiar, grim face of the first human SPECTRE. 

"We couldn't find you, then Jacob... Jacob turned on me. He tried to shoot me, Kaidan!" Liara said. "A panic broke out in the club, and I... I escaped. But I can't reach Garrus, and I can't reach Kasumi. Jacob said he wanted the maps for Cerberus, and... and.. Oh Goddess!" There was a loud sound, an explosion, in the background. Kaidan could hear people screaming, and quickly switched the call to speaker. "LIARA?" Moments later, the thick walls of the clinic shook, ever so slightly. 

"Extremely heavy munitions to reach this far." Solus tapped his chin. "War." 

"There are mechs here, out in the plaza," she gasped. "Black ones with glowing eyes... I've never... I'm tracking the clinic Aria called earlier. I'll send you the coordinates. We can meet there, and then..." There was a burst of static, even as the data for the doctor's clinic popped up on a small screen. 

"The sleeping army is awake. It's here," Shepard said, rising to his feet, still holding Kaidan's hand. " _Saren_ is here. For us." 

Kaidan pulled himself up, shoulder starting to burn with pain again, painkillers long worn off. "We have to get you out of here." He hated letting go of Shepard's hand, but he forced himself to, reaching for his shirt and coat. "I'll try and raise Garrus. We'll get back to the Normandy and..." He took a deep breath. "I'm not losing you again," Kaidan added, wincing as he pulled his shirt back on. 

"Tunnels through the Depths, best chance to make spaceport undetected," the doctor said, ratcheting off the safety on a hand cannon. It would have looked comical, an elderly amphibian with an enormous handgun in his tiny fingers.  Except it was very clear that Mordin Solus knew his way around a gun. 

"Goddamn frog and I'll getcha there," the Guntalker said. "Jessie ain't never let me down, have ya, girl?" he crooned to the assault rifle in his hands. 

"Zaeed quite possibly insane. Sociopathic. Excellent shot, however," Solus added, blandly. "Usually." 

Shepard was holding a gun as well, running his fingers over it, as if trying to remember how it all worked. "Shepard?" Kaidan put his hand over his husband's. "If you can't, don't worry. You don't have to fight, John." 

" _We_ have to," he said, red sparking behind his eyes as he flicked the gun in his hand, the ammo clip sliding into place with a solid click. "Garrus is here? And... Liara. Your friend. From the University." 

"I ended up with something of a team. Sort of. It's a long story. I'll tell you when we're safe." Kaidan squeezed Shepard's hand. 

Behind them, the door burst open, and Liara staggered through. Her neat travelling suit was filthy and tattered and the red dot of Solus' gun sight was bright against her skin. 

"LIARA!" Kaidan shouted, rushing to her side as she fell to her knees. Solus' hand never wavered, even as Shepard tentatively joined them, kneeling beside her. 

Kaidan felt a sting of shame that he'd doubted her on Jimmy-the-Dancer's insinuations. "Liara, are you ok?" he asked, carefully helping her to her feet. There was a distant rumble through the stone. 

"Goddess, it's madness out there," Liara said, shaking her head. "Oh, Kaidan. You found him!" She turned to Shepard. "Shepard? We never had the chance to meet..." She reached out a hand towards him. 

Shepard's red-lit eyes narrowed and he pulled away. "No. No. Infected organic co..." His words cut off as Liara's delicate blue fingers brushed his hand. 

And Shepard screamed, a terrible sound halfway between human and machine. 

The sudden flare of biotic energy caught Kaidan completely off-guard, slamming him backwards into Solus, the clinic's few pieces of furniture flying around like children's toys, battering them backwards into the wall. 

He blinked, untangling himself from the salarian, staring at the barrier sphere Liara had erected around herself and Shepard. "LIARA! What the hell?" He picked himself up. "You... we were friends!" 

"We _are_ friends, Kaidan," she said with a shake of her head. "I'm doing this for everyone." Shepard was on his knees, at her feet, clawing at his throat. "Did you know that asari have the ability to share memories? It's not like reading active thoughts, but we can follow the pattern of impulses in an organic brain that make up a memory. It doesn't take much to tweak one so those specific sets of stimuli get put on loop. Like the moment when the oxygen on his armoursuit failed, blood leaking out into the vacuum, skin burning and freezing. Bleeding out and suffocating, but the moment before the Synthetic decided to become one with him. Helpless." She bent down to pet Shepard's hair as Zaeed unloaded a clip into her barrier. 

The bullets hung in the watery blue field, slowly dropping to the floor. "Saren came to me," she said, wiping off her hand. "After we'd first spoken about Shepard's nightmares. He let me see _his_ memories. I've spent my entire life researching the history and stories of the Citadel, Kaidan. I can't let that die off. I can't let this world our predecessors built die off." 

Kaidan tried to poke around her barrier with his own powers, testing it.  "Liara, the Citadel's running on automatic systems. When they fail, _everyone_ will die. If we can find a way out, find our way back to the worlds our ancestors came from..." 

"No. Saren showed me his plan. We need to become better than we were. We need to become like the Old God, both organic and synthetic. He showed me the tests the Old God's automated systems had built." She smiled. "We're almost there. The husks were just the first step. But he knew Shepard didn't believe. So, he gave me the tip for Eden Prime, Kaidan. He thought Shepard would take you, not Nihlus." Liara shook her head for a moment. "Nothing personal." 

"You. Are. Out. Of. Your. Mind. Saren's... he's indoctrinated you!" Kaidan snarled, trying to keep his eyes on her, and not Shepard - screaming silently as he desperately clawed at a breached helmet that wasn't there. 

He thought he found an opening, tried to tear through the barrier with a warp, but she pushed it back, kicking up another singularity to tear through the room like a storm rolling across the atmo in the Wards. "Kaidan. I'm sorry. This is for the best. When Saren's plan is complete, we won't ever have to worry about the Citadel's systems shutting down. We'll all be a part of it. It will be _beautiful_." 

It was the last thing Kaidan heard before she detonated her barrier, and the world went blinding white.


	24. Chapter 24

_Every night on the Presidium was perfect, except for those few each month when the air scrubbers would cycle and a gentle rain would fall, watering the plants that grew along the lakes, and on every balcony.  
_

_When we could, we made an evening of it, cushions strewn on our balcony under the cherry tree, listening to the rain tap above us. Somewhere in the apartment, Bob would be signing his weird little lullaby, and Shepard would lie against me, watching the decorative clouds roll across the sky.  
_

_One night, tracing the edges of his lips with the rim of a beer bottle, Shepard told me he'd always envied my ability to trust... and be trusted.  
_

_"People **like**_ _me," he said, tapping his chin with the bottle. "But they don't_ **_trust_ ** _me. They're always expecting me to do something stupid."  
_

_"You usually are," I'd responded and we both laughed.  
_

_"But I don't trust them either. Just you." Shepard had put the bottle down, turned in my arms and pinned me between the heat of his body and the tree. "But you... you trust people. And I think that makes them want to be the best person they can be, to prove they're worthy of it."  
_

_His eyes were bright in the gloom, and he whispered, leaning close. "You make **me**_ _want to be the best person I can be."  
_

_Then, that made me proud, maybe just a little. Maybe more than that.  
_

_Now? It just made me angry._

~~ 

There was the hole where the front of the clinic had been, and Zaeed hadn't stopped cursing since he'd come to. There were words in his tirade that Kaidan were sure he was inventing right on the spot. 

"We have to find her!" Kaidan shouted as he shoved a chunk of debris off himself. "She has Shepard!!" He felt... sick. Angry. 

At Liara, certainly, but mostly at himself. 

"Not to worry. Shepard's unique biosynthetic signature relatively easy to trace," Solus said, half to himself, tapping something out on his omnitool. "Your friend isn't that far ahead,  headed back to the port." 

"She's not my friend. Not anymore." Kaidan fretted, picking his way through the rubble. "Garrus?" He tapped his earpiece, listening to static. "Come on, you ugly bastard, where are you?" 

"Been a little busy since the killer robots showed up, Alenko." Garrus' drawl in his ear was a welcome sound. "Did you find him?" In the background there was the sharp report of gunfire. "Booyah." 

Kaidan took a deep breath before he answered. "Liara's Saren's mole." The next words stuck in his throat like a shard of glass. "She took Shepard. She's headed for the port." 

"You're taking this remarkably well." Garrus's pinched tone was exactly how Kaidan felt. 

"I don't have the luxury of freaking out right now." Kaidan said tersely. "She said she had a run-in with Jacob. I don't know if that's true." 

"Shit. I haven't seen him OR Kasumi." Garrus said as he squeezed off another round at whatever he was shooting at. "I'll find out, then make my way to the port, meet you at the Normandy?" 

"We're headed there now," Kaidan said, as they fought their way through the tidal wave of  crowds fleeing for the perceived safety of the Depths. 

After a few miles, Mordin led them into a series of side waste-removal tunnels, no problem for the small, nimble frame of a salarian, but a tougher slog for Kaidan and Zaeed, who had actually stopped his steady stream of cursing to hold his breath from the stench and heat wafting up from below. 

The chute was dark and the rough-carved stone beneath Kaidan's fingers was unpleasantly textured with bits of detritus that had gotten hung up on its eventual way to the incinerators that burned somewhere in the heart of Omega. 

Each moment closer, the rumblings grew louder and the tunnels shook. "Doc, not to be ungrateful, but..." 

"Tunnels solid. Will not die in garbage chute, SPECTRE," Mordin cut him off, scrambling towards a patch of light. "Exit ahead." He paused, kicking open the flap in front of them. "Die in robot firefight, perhaps." 

Kaidan blinked as they clambered out onto a walkway above the port, smoke rising from damaged ships below. Several berths away and down three levels, he could see the Normandy was still docked, but there was a faint heat-shimmer around her engines. "Joker's cycling the engines, we have to get down there." 

Kaidan paused on the stairs, squinting at the distance as the lights flickered around them. Just beyond the port barriers, he could make out a ship, one too massive to dock in Omega's crowded terminals. 

The Council's private vessel - a luxury warship designed and built ages before Kaidan had been born for one purpose: to protect and house the council in times of emergency. To the best of his knowledge, the Destiny Ascension had never been used for that purpose. As a SPECTRE, he had been onboard once or twice, protection detail for the Council as they toured the agricultural and mining colonies throughout the Ring. 

It had been a cushy gig.  But he and Shepard had seen the specs on her. The Destiny Ascension had enough firepower to obliterate a good-sized asteroid. 

Perhaps even one as big as Omega. 

"Oh. _Fuck_ ," he said softly. 

"SPECTRE!" the doctor shouted and Kaidan's attention was dragged away from the Destiny Ascension as a throng of mechs, gleaming black with single glowing eyes, were forced back towards the docks. The Sleeping Army Shepard had spoken of. 

One exploded messily and a few more went skidding off the dock, a biotic push wedging through them like a ram. Nearby, Mordin incinerated one while Zaeed laughed maniacally and peppered the lot with armour-piercing rounds. 

Kaidan shook his head, still searching the screaming crowds and the mechs for any sign of Liara as the shockwave rolled out from him, tumbling the mech like so many tenpins. Several more exploded with mechanical screeches, and Kaidan blinked through the smoke to see Aria T'loak, her pearly white evening gown replaced by body armour, and her "dancer" Jimmy at her back, blowing holes in the mechs with a gun the size of Kaidan's leg. 

"Aria!" Kaidan fought his way to her and she gave him a withering look. 

"You. MORON," she hissed, smacking him in the face with enough force to stun an elcor. "I would have taken you to him, instead, we have THIS." 

"Hey! The robots are *not* my fault, Aria. Talk to your sister about that one." Kaidan rubbed his stinging face as Jimmy used the butt of his gun to smash another mech in the head. "The Destiny Ascension is parked outside, by the way." 

"Fuck." Aria rubbed her face. "I knew I should have kicked him out ages ago." 

"These mech, simply a delaying action," Mordin said briskly, coming up beside them. "Readings showing Shepard's life signs aboard Normandy. Which is leaving." 

Kaidan wheeled around in time to watch in horror as the Normandy silently pulled away from its berth. Quickly he tapped his comm. "Joker! Moreau, it's Kaidan Alenko. Listen, I'm ordering you to quit your launch and power your engines down!" he shouted. 

"I'm sorry, Major. I... can't do that." Joker's voice crackled in his ear. "Doc's paid me in full for the round trip, and frankly? What she's saying Saren can do - make us all a perfect combination of synthetic and organic? I kinda like that idea." 

"Jeff, listen to me, it's not going to be what you think!" Kaidan tried to keep himself calm. "I've seen feeds from the Leviathan. I know what it'll do, and..." 

"If it means I don't need to wear a mech suit to walk down a street? That I don't break a rib if I trip at home? I don't think it's such a bad idea, Major." Joker said bitterly. "See ya on the other side." 

"NO!" Kaidan shouted, feeling his heart stop. He started to make a run for it, leaping over downed mechs as his mind was racing as fast as his feet. (I can make the jump if I throw my powers behind it. Barrier can protect me from partial vacuum long enough to get the airlock open and..) The thought derailed as Jimmy tackled him, pinning Kaidan to the ground under his significant bulk. 

"Are you crazy?" Jimmy yelled at him. "You're gonna get yourself killed, and then what good're you gonna be?" 

"Goddess DAMN you! I could have made the jump, I could..." Kaidan fought down the urge to liquefy him, instead pounding the filthy pavement with his bare fist until the knuckles bled. "He's lost, they have him and I failed and... the Normandy's fast as hell, we'll never..." 

"We will. Don't worry," Jimmy said kindly. He put his big hand on Kaidan's head and gave him a little pat. "Aria, 'sokay if I borrow the car?" he asked and she rolled her eyes. 

"Don't scratch it up, or it's coming out of your pay," she snorted, glancing over her shoulder as Garrus came jogging towards the docks, Jacob following behind him. "Oh, look who decided to join us." 

"Har-har." Garrus's mandibles twitched in irritation. He was still wearing Kaidan's hat. "There are more of those things still wandering through the station." 

"Yeah. We had to fight our way through a knot of very angry robots to get here," Jacob added. His coat was torn and he was sporting a lump on his forehead the size of Kaidan's fist. 

"Jacob," he said and the other man frowned. 

"Where's Shepard?" Jacob looked around the docks, frown turning into something more panicked. "You had the maps and you LOST THEM?" 

Even Jimmy, who had been on a comm with someone apparently arranging transport, fell silent as Jacob's voice broke. 

"How did you know about the maps, Jacob?" Kaidan asked very carefully. He could see faint blue sparks dancing across the Jacob's deep brown skin. 

"You and Shepard were supposed to be beacons for humanity. And you've ruined everything!" Jacob shouted, powers flaring. "All the effort I wasted in getting people onto Eden Prime. All the effort in tracking your communications, in positioning myself with the perfect cover identity," he spat. "RUINED because of your ineptitude!" 

He powered down at the soft click of a gun at his temple. The air shimmered as Kasumi broke her cloak. "That's enough Mr. Taylor," she purred. "Or do you prefer to be called 'The Elusive Man?'" 

"Kasumi?" Garrus sputtered. 

"Kasumi Goto, C-Sec," she said with a little smile. "You provide a useful service to the Citadel, Mr. Vakarian. You take on the criminals that C-Sec doesn't have the resources for, and the SPECTREs can't be bothered with. I was sent in to make sure you stayed honest." Kasumi tapped the barrel of her gun against Jacob's head. "I've had my suspicions about our mutual friend here for a while, but it's hard to tell who to trust these days." 

"So wait, then neither one of you actually work for me because you care about cleaning up the streets?" Garrus flailed indignantly, and Kaidan elbowed him, grabbing his hat back."Kasumi, what about Keiji?"

Kasumi only shrugged. "I never lied about a profession I shared with a partner I loved," She said, sadly. "I just never mentioned what profession that was.'

"It doesn't matter if you kill me. I'm not the only Elusive Man Cerberus has had. Another will follow me. And frankly, there isn't going to be a Citadel to bring me back to, soon enough," Jacob grumbled, folding his arms. "We've been running our own simulations. Systems on the Citadel are already failing, You know that as well as I do, Alenko. The guidance system on Eden Prime, along with the conduit key... the only way to get us all out of this zoo and back to the worlds where we belong." 

Jacob folded his arms, scowling as Aria directed another wave of her personal soldiers to go hunt down the rest of the mechs. "And if Saren has his way, we won't care, because we're all going to be a bunch of slack-jawed abominations like the ones your husband put down on Eden Prime."


	25. Chapter 25

_We followed Jimmy to Aria's personal dock. And in the meantime, Jacob told me what Cerberus had discovered. It was hard to listen to him. I kept seeing Miranda's sad face before she ate that bullet. The tortured children in the Undercity.  Shepard going into the situation on Eden Prime with bad intel.  
_

_It went around and around in my brain, behind my eyes. Shepard's face as he told me he was leaving me behind.  
_

_I wanted to scream.  
_

_But I choked it back, stuck my hand in my pocket and held onto Shepard's badge harder than ever. The bite of the metal on my palm helped me focus, and as we got to Aria's "car" - a fancy, trident-class stealthship called the Blue Angel  - Jacob explained that Cerberus knew where the Conduit was - the gate that Shepard had given me the key for. The gate that Liara now had the key and the maps for because of me.  
_

_The Temple.  The very heart of the Citadel and its culture. The jewel in the five-pointed crown. And it was likely that's where Liara might take Shepard. It made an awful, sick sort of sense.  
_

_But the rest of it didn't. If Saren wanted Shepard dead, and the maps and data in his head destroyed, he could have had Liara kill him then and there in Mordin's clinic. Hell, he could have sent an agent to hunt Shepard down and murder him even before that, right?  
_

_No, even half out of his mind... even in the fragile symbiosis he shared with Legion, Shepard was more than capable of tearing apart anyone who tried to kill him. Which was where I came in.  
_

_Saren had needed **me**_ _to find him, get his guard down. And my ex-boss clearly didn't want Shepard dead until he'd gotten a look at all that information in his brain.  
_

_I didn't like where that train of thought was leading. If Saren had a plan to convert everyone on the Citadel to a bunch of husks, what was to say that he wouldn't want to spread the "perfection" around to the Homeworlds of myth? And if he was able to wake the Leviathan, would anyone be able to stop him?  
_

_No, I didn't like that train of thought at all.  
_

~~

The pilot of the Blue Angel was a handsome man. He carried himself with the easy authority of a military captain, but his deep blue eyes twinkled with amusement in the warmth of his dark face. 

"Mister Vega," he said, leaning in the Angel's airlock. The engines were already cycling and the shields glimmered in the smoke rolling off the docks where a pile of mechs lay burning. "Took you long enough. Had a swarm of angry robots to fend off." He jerked his thumb at the ship's turrets, heat rolling off the barrels. 

Kaidan felt a little tug in his chest as he watched the pilot and Jimmy Vega embrace. He knew that body language. The wish for something more but knowing there wasn't time. 

"Major, Esteban Cortez. Best pilot on Omega." Jimmy gave Cortez a gentle squeeze on the arm. "Permission to come aboard, Captain?" 

"Get moving." Cortez slugged him. "Major, I may not agree with dictatorial edicts of the Council, but I heard you're a man with integrity.  And Shepard... well... don't worry. We'll get them." He nodded at Kaidan. "The Destiny Ascension's still parked in orbit around Omega, so we're gonna have to get creative to get out without being turned into so much scrap metal." 

Mordin shouldered past them. "Will update ship's scanners to make tracking Normandy and Shepard easier." 

Cortez opened his mouth to protest, but Kaidan just put his hand on the man's shoulder. "... Don't. Just... let him do it." His omnitool beeped as Vega punted a call to him, and Kaidan tapped his earpiece. "Aria?" 

"Listen, Alenko. Omega's my town now, and my responsibility. I'm loaning you Vega and Cortez for now - but give this to me straight, are we going to war, here?" she growled. "Because if that goddamn bloated piece of space junk is out there threatening my city, I'm not going to just sit here and look pretty." 

Kaidan paused, watching Mordin tear into the Angel's guidance system to Captain Cortez's extreme displeasure. "Yeah. I think you're going to war," he said after a moment. "If Saren's got control of the Destiny Ascension? It means he's got control of the council. And control of Liara." 

"Fuck," she spat. "Well, try not to get everyone killed before I can clear out these mechs. That piece of shit wants to threaten me and brainwash my sister? I'm going to make sure he regrets all of it. Aria out." 

"Well, Aria's good and angry now." Kaidan shook his head, finding a seat in the main compartment. The Angel was a tiny ship, designed to carry a pilot, co-pilot and a small compliment of Aria's operatives. 

"She should be," Garrus muttered. "I've been getting reports in from the Citadel, from some of my contacts. It's not good." 

"Why should that start now?" Kaidan buckled in as the engines started their final power up.  He could see Vega strap in up front, clearly used to co-piloting the ship. 

"One of my people died sending this. Some of the 'closed for construction' zones in Zakera ward reopened this morning." Garrus tapped the tool at his wrist, bringing up a panoramic vid.  Through the open gates of one of the massive buildings, there were thousands of dark spikes, jutting up in jagged rows, acres into the gloom. Worse, there were figures shuffling in the darkness, the faint blue glow of biosynthetic implants marking their movements. 

Within moments, the image stuttered and flickered, and cut off as a husk filled the screen, mouth open in a silent howl. 

"Goddess." Kaidan covered his mouth. "The dragon's teeth that Shepard was talking about. Saren's already started."  He'd had control of the sleeping army for two years, Kaidan realised with a sick jolt. This is what Saren had been doing with it. 

"I've got my people trying to evacuate who they can, but..." Garrus shook his head. "It's not going to be enough." 

"Cerberus can help," Jacob said from where Kasumi had handcuffed him to a wall support. "We have facilities built below the Undercities - stockpiled, defensible. And we have ships... and soldiers." 

"For your upcoming war with everyone who wasn't a human?" Kasumi purred, draping herself across his shoulder. 

"I'm willing to put that aside right now. There won't be any humans left to fight for if we don't stop him." Jacob quirked an eyebrow at her. "My revolution won't exactly matter." He paused, then added sheepishly, "I... had a couple of units deploy to Omega as well... in the hopes we'd retrieve Shepard. I'll direct them to help Aria, just keep her from killing them." 

"We'll take it. Kasumi, can you get a hold of C-Sec?" Kaidan asked as she undid Jacob's handcuffs. 

She nodded.  "I'll try. I'm not sure who's side they're going to be on in this, but I'll see what I can do." 

Mordin gently touched Kaidan's arm as the others began their frantic calls. "Doing well. This will save lives." 

"John and I took an oath to protect the citizens of the Citadel...and, you know, by extension all the people in the Ring, the Graveyard. This is nothing less than he would have done, Doc." Kaidan pulled Shepard's badge out of his pocket. "I'm a SPECTRE." 

"Time perhaps to recall I once was as well," Mordin said. 

"I don't think you ever stopped, Doc." Kaidan said firmly as the Angel began to vibrate, the engines singing loudly in the bones of the ship. But instead of pulling away from the dock, the moment the docking clamps released, the ship began to plummet downwards, into the heart of Omega - the Well. 

Kaidan barely had a moment to grab onto a seat as the ship dropped. From the cockpit, there was a whoop, nearly drowned out by Garrus' startled shriek. "Sorry, folks," Vega called back to them. "Please keep your hands inside the vehicle and your lunches inside your guts until the ride has come to a complete stop." 

Kaidan's stomach was somewhere up around his eyeballs as the Angel rocketed down through the Well, and Zaeed was making that nasty laugh. Everything that wasn't strapped down was floating, and Kasumi perched herself on Jacob's lap with a sly grin. 

"We exit through the main port gates, that fascist, bloated pig of a ship'll blow us out of the sky," Cortez said. Kaidan could see the control implants in his arms shimmering with green faery fire under his dark skin. The Angel's wings flexed with the tiny motions of his muscles, steering engines guiding them around hissing pipes and a minefield of ejecta spewing out into the Well. Like Joker, his face was an image of bliss, interacting with the ship. 

The ship shuddered as the gravity and pressure began to increase against the hull. "Hang on... it's gonna get a little bumpy from here on out." Cortez barely raised his voice, the Angel plunging down into the dull red light that filled the cockpit and spilled out into the crew cabin. The walls of the Well glowed with waste heat, and alerts began to sound. 

There was a rumble deep inside the ship's core as the klaxons went off, a rumble that Kaidan felt all the way in his teeth. 

"Gravity 200%, heat increasing exponentially. Barriers aren't gonna take much more of the abuse, Esteban." Vega sounded equally calm. "1500 metres to Well exit." 

"Ye of little faith, Mister Vega," Cortez said with a smirk. "I know my baby." 

Kaidan saw the sweat beading on Jacob's forehead and took a deep breath. Beside him, Mordin was perfectly calm, the salarian's enormous eyes blinking slowly. "Would expect you to be used to this. Have heard stories of Shepard's driving," he said. 

Kaidan laughed weakly as Cortez rolled the Angel and the shaking abruptly stopped, gravity suddenly reasserting itself. The alarms quieted as a new spread of sensor screens popped up. 

Beyond the cockpit was the darkness of space, and Cortez guided the ship easily around the debris clinging in orbit around Omega. "Ladies and gentlemen, the Captain has turned off the seatbelt light, and you are free to move about the cabin," Vega said. "We've got Normandy in our sights, she's moving away from Omega at high speed." 

Kaidan disentangled himself from his seat as Garrus breathed a sigh of relief. "Is she meeting up with the Destiny Ascension?" 

"Nope. Tracking directly for the Citadel," Vega said with a frown. "Fucking spirits," he breathed. "Destiny Ascension's moving away as well, weapons powering up." His fingers danced over the sensor controls. "Shit." 

"There's no way to evacuate Omega, is there," Kaidan said. "He's going to kill millions of people." 

"The Depths can handle the impact of almost any weapons." Vega didn't sound entirely convinced. "Don't you read your history, Major? A couple of thousand years ago, Omega stood up to the full force of the Citadel." 

"If I remember, that rebellion also didn't last long." Kaidan gripped the back of Vega's seat as Cortez brought the ship around. "Can you at least warn them?" 

"Already sent the alarm," Vega said tersely. "Spirits. Aria..." There was a shockwave as the first burst from the Council ship's cannons raked along Omega's stony exterior. "It's gonna hold. It's got to." 

"Aria's tough. So's Omega." Kaidan squeezed his shoulder. "Can we do anything?" 

"Blue Angel's a stealthship. She doesn't carry the kind of firepower necessary to even put a dent in that bourgeois piece of shit," Cortez grumbled. 

"Saren won't be aboard. He's going to be wherever Liara and the Normandy are headed. We stop him, we stop his army and we save the Citadel *and* Omega. Do you think Aria and the rest can hold out?" 

"Every smuggler and merc left is gonna be out for blood. If they go down, they're gonna take that ship with 'em," Vega said, hands fisting. "We go after this Saren bastard. Let's do this."


	26. Chapter 26

_I am John Shepard. I am Legion. I am one thousand, one hundred and eighty three roads in the darkness. I am a policeman, a SPECTRE. I am a husband and a lover. I am the memories of a dead race.  
_

_I am a weapon against the shadow in the graveyard, the monster in the dark of space. I am the key that opens the gateway to the stars.  
_

_I am a man, wrapped in fragile meat. Trapped in a loop of darkness and cold and the air  rushing from my lungs, my eyes boiling in their sockets.  
_

_And I am afraid._

_Kaidan... I'm afraid._

~~ 

Kaidan jerked upright, Garrus' hand on his shoulder, gently shaking him. He gasped, sucking in the air like Shepard had so desperately tried in his dream. Garrus' talons tightened for a moment, then released him. "Cortez is pacing the Normandy," he said. "Bad dream?" 

"It didn't feel like a dream." Kaidan scrubbed his hand over his face. "How far out are we from the Citadel?" 

"Two hours. You've been asleep for a while," Garrus drawled, leaning against the cabin wall as Kaidan found his feet. He shoved a protein bar at Kaidan, munching on a dextro one for himself. 

"What's the situation?" Kaidan looked around, the bar quickly disappearing into his mouth, at the others hunched over a small table, looking at a display of the Citadel. 

"The newsfeeds coming off the Citadel are saying there was a biological weapon attack from Cerberus in across the wards. Citizens are being herded to 'protected areas' that were just reopened from construction. " Garrus snorted. "Protected areas full of Dragon's Teeth." 

"We've been putting out counter-messages, saying there was no attack and Cerberus isn't to blame. Half of C-Sec's gone underground and we've been taking in refugees, but comms are spotty," Jacob said, offering Kaidan a cup of murky coffee. 

"There have been reports of husks moving through the Downcity streets in Zakera and Shalta Wards," Kasumi added. "No word from the others, but I can guess it's the same. They're hitting all the lower class areas first, where people have the least amount of protection. There's not nearly enough officers to combat this." 

"Destiny Ascension's locked in a firefight over Omega and Normandy's still on course for the Temple of Athame," Vega's voice drifted from the cockpit. "It's the most highly defended piece of real estate on the Citadel and eventually, we're going to have to break cover. We've never run the stealth systems this long - she's gonna have to dump waste heat soon, or the drive core's gonna cook." 

"Liara's gotta figure we're following her somehow." Kaidan paced with the coffee. "Is there any way we can overtake her?" 

"I can break stealth mode, vent the core heat and redirect the extra power to the engines, sure," Cortez said, fingers dancing in the control grid. "But I don't know what kind of firepower that ship's packing. We're in range of a lot of different types of weapons, and there's an uncomfortably long window after coming out of stealth where we won't have enough power to shoot back with." 

Kaidan cursed. "Fall back, give us room to manoeuvre, then drop cloak until we're on the Citadel. She's bringing Shepard to Saren... he's safe until then," Kaidan said, trying to run the numbers in his head. "See if you can't find us a different course?" 

"Debris field," Cortez said, the pitch of the drive core changing with the motions of his hands. "Citadel ejects whatever's not recycled into space where the Junkers strip it. Every pilot skirts it on the run between Omega and the Citadel." 

"It'll take a couple of hours off our travel time," Vega added, bringing a display up. "Provided we don't end up full of holes or crash into something." 

"Words hurt, Mister Vega." Cortez shook his head. "Well, Major?" 

"Do it, and try not to get us killed." Kaidan frowned out at the vista before them, stars flickering as Vega dropped the stealth field. 

"Normandy's spotted us, weapons coming online," Vega said abruptly. "...your pal has some pretty impressive weapons on an antiquated piece of shit like that." The displays all began to flash red, warnings about target locks scrolling across the screens. "...Oh boy. Normandy's guns are hot and we've still got a minute till we have enough power for return fire." 

"Get us out of here, Captain!" Kaidan shouted as the Normandy's rear guns trained on them. "I forgot to mention, he's got a combat AI running the ship!" 

"I got this," Cortez gritted his teeth. He was nearly out of his seat, as if he could physically wrench the Angel onto a new course. "James, get us in cloak again now!" He shouted as he dove the ship into the cloud of garbage. The ship shook violently as the Normandy's blast seared through the shields and skidded along the Angel's hull. The alarms screeched and Cortez began to swear a streak that even Zaeed would've been impressed by. 

Kaidan hung onto the back of Cortez's seat, Garrus scrambling into the cockpit with them. "What the hell's going on up here?" 

"Weapons lock off, Normandy's not coming around for another pass," Vega shouted over the noise. "Dropping stealth mode again." 

"We're also taking a beating from the microdebris." Cortez sounded calmer. "Running emergency repair sequences. We should mostly be fine. I would _really_ like to properly dogfight that ship sometime, though," he added with a shaky little grin. 

"I'll try to make sure you get that chance." Kaidan dropped his forehead to Cortez's headrest. "Just get us to the Temple in one piece." 

"Aye, Major," Cortez said, and slugged Vega in the arm, grin widening. 

Kaidan leaned over to Vega's seat. "You make a good team," he whispered, feeling a twinge in his chest again at the affection. 

"Thanks, Major," Vega said, glancing up at him. "Don't worry. You an' Shepard'll be back together in no time." 

"I believe you, Jimmy. Thanks," Kaidan said, hoping the sincerity in his words was enough to convince his own misgivings.


	27. Chapter 27

_Truth be told, I would have liked to see Cortez and Joker have their dogfight, but this wasn't the time.  
_

_Cortez skipped the Angel in between the chunks of the Citadel's garbage, in between the scurrying Junker ships like a stone on the surface of the Presidium's lakes. The ship was damaged worse than he was letting on though, just by the way the alerts showed we were venting fuel.  
_

_The situation on the Citadel was looking grim as well. Husks were terrorising the poor and the disenfranchised in the Down and Undercities while the better-off were still unwittingly marching to Saren's machines, the Dragon's Teeth.  
_

_But there was a little hope, C-Sec and Cerberus, along with Garrus' vigilantes, clearing paths to safety. An alliance I thought I'd never see, fighting together.  
_

_They just needed to hold on a little longer.  
_

_The flight path Cortez took us on skirted the underside of the Citadel, the station's massive superstructure blocking out every bit of starlight. It was pure shadow, the darkest space I could imagine.  
_

_The lights at the Angel's wingtips barely illuminated the gloom before us, before Cortez brought her up, slipping between the arms of the Citadel like a knife through the ribs. I could see Shalta Ward slipping by, thick coils of black smoke rolling up from the burning Undercity.  
_

_But the cockpit should have been flooded with the violet glow coming off the nebula. Instead, it was a dim, greyish light.  
_

_Vega let off a low whistle, and I followed his gaze, down the length of the station.  
_

_Bigger than one of the wards and blacker than space, throwing its shadow across the Citadel.  
_

_The monster in the dark. The old god. The **Leviathan**_ _.  
_

_It was here._

_~~_

"No offence, Major," Cortez said as they limped over the dying lights of Shalta Ward. "But that's definitely out of the Angel's weight class." 

It was very still, backlit in hazy violet by the nebula as it loomed over the Citadel.  All around them, the station's defences were silent, the constant neon bustle of the wards going dark around them. 

"Maybe we can find an alternate route into the Temple." Garrus scratched at his scars, armoured face flexing into the closest thing a turian had to a scowl. "Sneak in..." 

"No," Kaidan said abruptly, smoothing the lapels on his coat. "There's only two ways in, trust me - I spent years figuring that out. There's one dock at the Temple, designed for the Destiny Ascension, but they also use it for incoming... cargo. The only other way in is the Bridge." 

(Shepard would go in the front door, like a storm. Like an indestructible battering ram ripping through their enemies.) 

He wasn't Shepard. He _couldn't_ be Shepard.

 He could only be himself. And that meant smarter rather than tougher. 

"Keep us in stealth. Bring us around to the Temple dock. If Normandy's there, I want her boarded and locked down. Cortez, Vega... I'm putting you on that duty. Kasumi, you're their ace in the hole." Kaidan checked the clip on his Paladin, then scrolled through the data on his omnitool. "Even together, the two ships are half the size of the Destiny, so we're going in through the back door. The Bridge would be a gauntlet we'd have to run. I'm not really feeling that right now. I'm sending everyone a map of the building." 

"I can get us to where we need to go. If my intel was good, there's a chamber at the spire, it's where the gate is," Jacob said. "That's where it'll all go down." 

"Coming up on the Temple. No signs of activity from the big guy," Cortez said as the others joined them in the cockpit. "Normandy's docked, but the engines are still hot. She just got in. " 

"I'm still getting normal chatter off the Presidium,"  Kasumi said, listening to something over her earpiece. "Whatever C-Sec divisions are loyal to Saren must have the Ring locked down. They're not getting any real news. Just some pap from the Temple." 

"Probably don't even care if it doesn't affect them," Jacob snorted. "Living in luxury like that." 

"I grew up downcity on the Presidium," Kaidan snapped. "My folks worked their asses off for that life. But the Council's there, the main C-Sec armoury's there, the SPECTRE armoury is there. It makes sense to keep it calm while the Wards are locked down. " 

"Coming up on Normandy. Better gear up, Mister Vega," Cortez interrupted, giving Jimmy a grin. "We're only going to get one shot at a surprise attack." 

"Let's do this," Kaidan nodded, and the ship shook as Cortez fired the emergency docking pins into Normandy's hull. 

"Normandy weapons coming online, but we're too close for them to fire without being caught in the blowback with those cannons." Cortez brought the Angel's smaller guns to bear. "We don't have that same issue. Go, go!" 

The docking tube punched through the one linking the Normandy to the Temple, and Kaidan led his team into the structure while Vega drew EDI's security systems. 

(Good luck to us all.) Kaidan prayed, even though he wasn't entirely sure Athame was even listening to his voice at this point. 

They moved quickly into the cargo entrance of the Temple, Mordin sending out tiny probes to scan ahead of them. "Do not like this," he said quickly. "No signs of any mechs. Reading Shepard's signal upwards, but no resistance." 

"Yeah. You know those horror vids? Where the teenagers go exploring an abandoned, haunted mineship or something?" Garrus drawled next to him, ratcheting his rifle. "Some asshole always says..." 

"It's too fuckin' quiet," Zaeed blurted out behind them. 

"Yep. _There_ we go." Garrus sighed, throwing up his clawed hands. "Now we're fucked." 

"I'm glad you're keeping your sense of humour, Vakarian," Kaidan whispered as Mordin overrode the security on a freight elevator. 

"Well, it beats being curled up and sobbing with my thumb in my mouth because we're in the shadow of an unthinkably ancient monster that wants to convert all of us into shambling biosynthetic husks." Garrus sounded offended. "I'll have my nervous breakdown later, after we blow Saren's head off and try to figure out how to make that thing go away." 

The lift dinged and they quickly piled in, weapons at the ready. "Just had a thought," Mordin said as the door closed with a solid thunk. "Possible Saren wishes us to join him upstairs." 

"Now you tell us." Kaidan stared at him as the floors began to climb past. 

"Goddamn frog," Zaeed intoned, chambering a round.


	28. Chapter 28

_I had ridden in the main elevators more times than I could count - glass and polished steel looking out into the gardens and then the nebula itself as you rose upwards.  
_

_They were designed to increase the awe you were supposed to feel, rising up over a kilometre, looking out at all the Wards spread out before you, imagining the Goddess having that same view with her infinitely benevolent smile.  
_

_The ride was silent, except for soft music. We were never allowed to speak in there. It was supposed to be a time for meditation.  
_

_The freight elevator was a different story. It clunked and shook, the walls stained with engine grease and the scuffs and dings of thousands of years of use. It smelled, not of lavender and herbs like the main elevators, but of stale sweat and burnt oil.  
_

_Mordin's omnitool showed Shepard's life signs at the spire itself - a place I had never been, in all the years I'd been in the Temple. Past the Hierophant's chambers, past the highest viewing gardens.  
_

_We were going to the very top of our world.  
_

~~ 

"Lift only goes to this level." Mordin pointed to the Hierophant's chambers on the schematics glowing from his omnitool. "Probes have gone ahead of us, returning strange readings." 

"More of those black mechs?" Jacob leaned in, narrowing his eyes at the oddly moving heat signatures. 

"No, look at how they're moving. Erratically. Husks?" Garrus clicked his mandibles in annoyance. "Kaidan, what's in there?" 

"The Hierophant's offices, the administrative centre for the whole temple, the whole network of temples." Kaidan scrubbed his face. "If I remember right, there's also emergency meeting chambers for the Council." He looked at the others. "It's the soul of the Citadel, right here." 

"We'll try not to break anything important," Garrus snorted, shouldering his rifle. 

The lift clunked to its final stop and Kaidan motioned everyone away from the door. His barrier crackled against fabric and skin as he slapped the holographic interface on the door. "If there's access to the spire, it'll be through the private areas," he whispered. "I think." 

The door slid open into the dark. Overhead, the lights sputtered, sending occasional flashes of light before going out again. It was enough, though, to see the blood on the walls. 

"Fuck," Zaeed breathed as they cautiously stepped out of the lift, vulnerable as their eyes adjusted to the darkness. "This ain't good." 

Kaidan tripped over something, and the clatter set them all on edge as he flailed to regain his footing. "What was that?" Jacob whispered loudly. 

"I tripped," Kaidan, said, bending down. "Sorry." A flare of his barrier cast a dim blue light around them, and he scowled as the lights guttered and flared again overhead. Remains of the Temple's keepers, green guts pooling sticky on the floor and mixing with the purplish stains of asari blood, were strewn about like broken toys. 

"Spirits," Garrus said behind him, accompanied by a soft rustle as he made a warding gesture. 

"Claw marks in wall," Mordin said as a thin, bone-chilling howl echoed in the dark. "Suspect we are not alone."  He tapped his omnitool, a small orange probe streaking into the darkness. It vanished, followed moments later by a small explosion. 

The end of the corridor was suddenly filled with the flickering blue glow of biotics. The howl echoed again, making Kaidan's hair prickle. Then darkness, followed immediately by the light, jumping ever closer. 

Garrus steadied his rifle and peered through the scope, almost dropping it with a curse.  A moment later, another biotic jump in the darkness, and Kaidan saw why. She... it... had been an asari once, that much was clear from the curving head cartilage that swept back from the gaping, disfigured face. The typical shimmering blue scales of asari skin were a mouldering grey, the dull glow of synthetic organs showing through the thinnest parts. 

It howled again, and Garrus promptly put a bullet between its eyes. The howl cut off and it fell back. "Disgusting," he growled, ratcheting another round into the chamber. "Easy to kill, at least..." he started to say, as it rose back to its feet, ferociously long fingers pulling the slug from its forehead. "...or not." 

It shrugged off the warp Kaidan focused on it, Jacob's throw, and the incendiary drones Mordin generated from his omnitool. And it howled again, the pitch sliding farther up the scale until Kaidan's teeth hurt. 

Behind it, more points of light flickered closer in the shadows. 

"Remember what I said about us being fucked?" Garrus asked, sighting another shot into the darkness. 

After the sharp retort of their guns, Kaidan sent a shockwave roaring down the corridor. It shattered the fitful lights in a shower of sparks and crumbled the plastered walls to dust. But the approaching creatures were unmoved. The one in the lead howled again, fired off a blast that sent Zaeed hurtling backwards. The power clung to him, eating away at his life force in a parody of the reave skill Kaidan had once learned. 

He dodged, barely, a blast meant for him, and tried the same trick back. It briefly staggered the creature, but the power that flowed back along their brief connection was fetid and bitter. Kaidan broke it off, firing off another series of rounds at its eyes. 

"We're too close, Garrus!" he said, gritting his teeth. "I am **not** giving up now. I don't care if..." 

"FIRE IN TH'HOLE!" Zaeed shouted, and Kaidan barely had time to throw up a barrier before the hallway was engulfed in a gout of flame that crackled up the walls and sucked away the air before filling the narrow space with the stench of burning carpet and what might have been a panicked scream from the creatures. 

"Goddamn screamin' banshees is what these are," Zaeed spat as he hoisted another grenade. "But they don't like these babies one bit, do they?" He turned to Kaidan as he thumbed the switch on his next grenade. "Go on, run, you fool! I'll cover you!" 

Kaidan sighted a side corridor, and grabbed Garrus by the arm. "Go, go go!" he shouted, diving clear as another blast rocked the banshees back. But it didn't stop them. 

He turned in time to see the smouldering creatures descend on Zaeed. He laughed that ugly, nasty laugh of his and gave Kaidan a wink as he thumbed the switch on his last grenade. 

"Go get 'im," the old merc mouthed as he vanished, engulfed in the fireball.


	29. Chapter 29

_The banshees Zaeed died to hold off weren't alone.  
_

_We fought our way through the maze of service corridors and up the ancient, twisting metal staircase against gibbering husks and spider-like creatures covered with oozing sacs of terrifying young.  
_

_Behind me I heard a cry as Jacob went down, his barriers faltering under the onslaught.  
_

_I turned to get him but he levelled his gun at me instead.  
_

_"Get Shepard and stop this son of a bitch," he said, blood at the back of his throat. "I'm good. I've got a loaded weapon, biotics and a lot of unresolved anger issues."  
_

_We left him with the roar of his hand cannon echoing against the metal walls.  
_

_I was ready for anything when we got to the top.  
_

_Anything but a slow clap and Saren's dry chuckle.  
_

_"Well done, SPECTRE Alenko, well done."_

~~ 

The inside of the spire was nothing like Kaidan would have expected. 

There were no statues, no flowering trees, no religious iconography. There was only the nebula and the Citadel spread out all around them, as if the spire were completely open to space. 

In the centre of the massive room was a... machine. At least he assumed it was a machine. It was huge. Three pillars rose up from the floor, flickering like rainbows through black glass. They supported a central device - a tuning fork of impenetrable black. In the centre of THAT were rings, slowly rotating around each other, blue-white light like the flare of biotics, dancing off the edges. 

"The Conduit," Kaidan said softly. 

Saren stepped out from behind one of the pillars as he clapped.  The elderly turian's eyes were bright in the shadows of his armoured face - bright with an unnatural glow. 

"Kaidan." He said with that same chuckle. "As your superior officer, I applaud your tenacity and skill." He rubbed a claw along his battered mandibles. "You and Shepard were always quite the pair.  There were so many that said you'd only ridden his coattails into the SPECTREs, but I... I always knew better, Kaidan. I always knew he was only half the man he could be without you. Shepard might have been the brawn.. but you?" He took a step forward, clasping his hands behind his back. "You were always the brains of your little relationship." 

There was the sharp retort of a gun over his shoulder, the bullet aimed between Saren's eyes pinging harmlessly off a near-invisible barrier as Garrus ratcheted another round into the chamber. The barrel hissed softly. "It was worth a try," he drawled with a shrug. 

The older turian shook his head, sadly. "Archangel, please."==== 

"Where _is_ he, Saren?" Kaidan clenched his fist. The barrier was too powerful for Saren to be generating it, it had to be the machine, he thought, cautiously pushing against the edges of it with his own power. "This doesn't have to end in any more violence. The Old God... it's... it's done something to you." 

"I know," Saren shook his head, then slowly peeled back a strip of flesh on his hand.  Behind him, Kaidan heard Garrus make a nauseated little sound as Saren dropped the rough-plated skin to the floor. 

Beneath was the flickering tracery of biosynthetics they'd seen on the other converted people. Saren clicked his mandibles in a turian smile. "Beautiful, isn't it, Kaidan?" 

"Fascinating," Mordin clucked behind him. "Would be very interested in studying this as opposed to Shepard's..." 

"Not _now_ , Doc," Kaidan said out of the corner of his mouth. "Although if you could find an in on that barrier, I'd be grateful," he added quietly. 

"We're... refining the process.  Each generation of biosynthetics to come out of mass processing is better, more intelligent. The husks roaming about now, like the ones we made on Eden Prime, are just production waste." Saren ignored them, pacing. "But for important organics... SPECTREs, the Council, we're taking a more... craftsmanly approach. We need to preserve them better." 

The old turian took a step towards Kaidan. "I know it seems very... melodramatic, I suppose, to tell you all this, Alenko. But I'm telling you because I don't want any further violence either." he motioned with his claw, pointing upwards to a chamber at the base of the machine. Liara stood next to it. 

Shepard was inside, curled fetal on himself and unmoving, still wrapped in her stasis field. His eyes were completely blank, and the orange lights beneath his skin seemed diminished somehow. "Don't worry, Kaidan," she said with a faltering smile, before he could protest. "He's safely in stasis, waiting for you." 

"Not only can we protect... _perfect_... our shared culture, our rich history, as the old gods wanted by uplifting us here..." Saren was saying then. He turned away from Kaidan to admire the machine. "...but with this gift of the ancients, and the data in our dear Shepard's head, we can share that perfection, spread it to every world our ancestors came from, let it grow outward from that, until there is no more death, no more decay. Everything in perfect balance." 

He turned back to Kaidan, mandibles quivering. "I need generals for that, Alenko. I have already taken steps to fully transform our brothers and sisters in the badge. But I want you to come back willingly.  You and Shepard will be together forever, Kaidan. Isn't that what you always wished for? It's yours if you simply embrace this new synthesis as your beloved did." 

"Shepard accepted it so he could survive. So he could stop **you** ," Kaidan said. Beside Shepard, Liara no longer looked quite as convinced. She frowned, as if struggling with whatever hold Saren had on her. "Liara, is this worth it? You must have seen those... those banshees. Those were asari, Liara! That's what Saren's offering. All of our lives reduced to that... for what?" 

"Kaidan... I..." she stammered, blinking furiously. Sweat beaded on her brow, sparkling in the violet light. 

"Shepard fought to bring us hope, Liara. A new future for all of us beyond the Citadel."  Kaidan started to plead, his words lost when Saren's biotic slam tossed him across the room. He hit the transparent wall hard enough to see stars, and slumped to the floor. 

"That's quite enough, Major. I want you to know, I take no pleasure in this, Alenko. I would have been... gentle with you. Given you what was left of Shepard when I was done mining the maps from his brain," he said. 

He snapped his fingers, and the door on the other side of the room opened with a slow creak. Husks of different species and more of his Sleeping Army gathered there. "It's been a pleasure, Alenko, but now I'm going to have your brain in a jar on my shelf next to whatever's left of your mate's."


	30. Chapter 30

_They had been turians, humans, asari, batarians. Shambling like the ghosts on the Leviathan, sad hollow moans tangled in their throats.  
_

_The mechs scurried like insects amongst them, and my skin crawled.  
_

_Three of us against all that? There was no way of knowing how many others the tower held, if Vega and the others could get to us in time for backup.  
_

_Garrus picked off a husk and gave me a little nod, then Mordin.  
_

_To make matters worse, the machine was starting to hum. Saren's fingers danced over a holoboard, Liara's VI assistant nearby, no doubt entering the complex data key required to activate the Conduit.  
_

_I kicked up a shockwave that barely shook the spire, scattering the smaller husks as Doc Solus lit a group on fire. We watched them flail but it wasn't going to be enough. It wasn't going to be nearly enough.  
_

_We were going to die here.  
_

_Shepard was so close. Twenty feet, no more. Caught in a horrible memory of airless space just out of my reach as the machine dug into his brain for Legion and its maps. "John. You make me strong," I said to him, even if he couldn't hear. "Always."  
_

_I didn't expect what happened next. Up on the platform, Liara screamed like the banshees had, clutching her head, a wave of biotic force rolling away from her.  
_

~~ 

"GODDESS NO," she screamed, clawing at the graceful curves of her head sweeps. The blow of her power caught Saren off guard, knocking him into one of the pillars, as she struggled to her feet. 

Kaidan warped a mech to pieces, afraid to take his attention away for too long. But when he glanced up, she'd opened the chamber. She was shaking, a thin line of purplish blood dribbling from her nose, as she held Shepard up. 

"John!" Kaidan shouted as a husk tackled him, spindly fingers digging at his face. "JOHN!!" 

Shepard's eyes snapped open, glowing red and alien.  The tracery of orange light beneath his skin flared brightly, then he was gone in a flare of blinding blue. The sonic boom of a biotic charge in the confines of the spire was deafening, and he was on Saren a moment later. 

The first nova broke fissures into the floor as Saren barely avoided the blow. "Shepard," he hissed. 

The husk Kaidan was struggling with came apart in his grasp, Liara's singularity tearing it apart. She was still shaking, eyes wide and dark, but she nodded at him. 

Kaidan nodded back as behind him, Garrus had switched to cryo rounds, freezing his targets while Mordin incinerated them. "Go help Shepard kill that bastard!" Garrus shouted, bashing the end of his gun in a husk's face before reloading. "We got this." 

After two years, it took Kaidan a moment to find the rhythm in Shepard's movements as he charged Saren, then fell back, shockwave tearing up the polished floor. In spite of his age, Saren was preternaturally nimble, dancing away to slam Shepard backwards, tearing at his barriers with reave. 

But they had always danced together, Sentinel and Vanguard, and Kaidan saw the pattern, his warp shredding Saren's barriers as Shepard charged again. The sonic boom echoed in their bones as Saren tried to dump his barrier to deflect the impact, only to find himself caught as Shepard's pull threw him into the range of Kaidan's stasis. 

It wasn't as strong as Liara's, and Saren clawed at it as all around them the hum of the machine grew louder and louder. "Shepard, Alenko," he shouted over the device, and the fight raging behind them. "Listen to me. It won't end with me. The Old God will never let it end. It wants us to progress to the next level, to become like it. Then start the cycle of collection again." His armoured skin was sloughing off, revealing the sickly pulse of the biosynthetic organs beneath. "You'll have to kill it, if you ever truly want to be free." 

The rest of his words were drowned out as the spire began to shake violently from the furious spin of  the rings in the giant machine. The violet light of the nebula was lost in the diamond-bright light shining from the heart of the device, and the fighting stopped when the beam tore from it, knocking them all off their feet. The husks scrabbled away from the light in terror, and the remaining mechs fell twitching to the floor as the power shorted them out. 

Kaidan skidded across the floor as the spire tilted wildly, the beam spreading outwards to fill the space of the Presidium Ring. There was a horrible rumble, and the light outside shifted. 

Shepard was beside him, hands tight on Kaidan's arms. "Look!" he shouted. "The gate is opening!" 

Outside, the Citadel began to open, like some enormous flower, petals spreading as the spire lurched again. Something wavered in the light, a curtain being drawn back in space to show something Kaidan had never seen in his life. 

It was a planet, shining in the light of a sun. 

He clung to Shepard, too mesmerised to be afraid. "Is that one of the Homeworlds?" he said, trying to make himself heard over the din. 

"The first stage," Shepard said distantly. "All roads lead from Ilos, the lost world." 

"Thank you for opening the way." It wasn't Saren's voice behind them, and Kaidan wheeled. There was almost nothing left of the old turian, flesh hanging from him in tattered ribbons as he lurched towards the machine. His eyes glowed with a red light so dark, it felt like someone was hammering on the back of Kaidan's retinas. "The cycle will  continue," the alien voice croaked from his throat. "I am the Watcher in the Dark. I am Nazara, lord of the Collectors. And I will continue our work to..." 

Two gunshots, so closely timed they could have been one, and Saren's body crumpled with a hole in the head big enough for Kaidan to put his fist through. Shepard twirled his own gun, then stuffed it back in his filthy coat. 

"We've had enough of him," he said with the face of Shepard the Indestructible before it softened. "Kaidan..." 

Kaidan holstered his own gun, turning in Shepard's arms as the spire's great translucent walls began to shriek and crack. "Shepard," was all he could muster back, running his fingers over his husband's damaged face. "I..." 

"Not to interrupt, but idea!" Mordin shouted to them. "Conduit beam very powerful," he said as they gathered around Saren's holoboard. " Can use it to destroy our giant friend." 

"That's great!" Kaidan tightened his hand on Shepard's.

Nearby, Garrus was helping Liara to her feet. "Well, let's do it, already," he said. 

"Not that easy. Requires biotics to direct, from the chamber above." Mordin's inner eyelids blinked. "Survival of subject... unlikely," he added with a sniff. 

Kaidan clamped his hand over Shepard's mouth as the other man opened it to speak. "Don't. You. Dare. Don't you dare offer to sacrifice yourself in this thing," he growled. "If you're doing this, we're going together." 

"Kaidan..." Shepard pulled the hand from his mouth, then pressed a kiss to it with a nod. "Together." 

"I'm biotic as well," Liara interrupted. "Let me. This... so much of this is my fault. I can..." 

"Fuck that," Jacob snarled from the door. His dark skin was ashy, his coat torn and shiny-dark with blood. 

"Jacob?" Kaidan left Shepard's side to help the Cerberus officer into the room. "Holy shit, you're alive." 

"Not for much longer," he snorted. "Which is why you all are going to get the hell out of here after the doc here tells me what I need to do." 

"You don't have to..." Kaidan said, and Jacob shrugged him off. 

"Listen to me, Alenko. When history looks back on this, I want it known that humanity, not the asari or the turians or the salarians.. that HUMANITY...  stood tall here and paid the price for our freedom." He straightened. "Now get the hell out of here before I change my mind."


	31. Chapter 31

_We didn't look back, Jacob's defiant shout as he struggled to guide the Conduit's power burning in our ears as we ran.  
_

_Blast doors had sealed at the end of the stairwell, and Shepard tore them open before Mordin could try to hack through them, orange fire dancing in the cracks in his flesh.  
_

_All around us, the Temple was coming apart. We scrambled down crumbling stairs and emergency exits, the lifts already crashing into the sub levels. It seemed like a never-ending downward rush, the building collapsing in our wake. We were trapped in darkness except for the glow of biotics and our omnitools.  
_

_The combined force of our powers ripped a hole through a nearby wall as we staggered out into light.  
_

_The main floor of the temple, glass walls splintered and cracking, sending a crazy shower of rainbows across the shaking room. The flowering trees were bare, their petals scattered across the floor.  
_

_Shepard paused, then looked at me with stricken face. We both knew this was the last time we'd see this place. The place where it all began.  
_

_"We have to get to the dock," I said before the emotion dragged us under. "We have to go **now**_ _!"_

~~ 

They reached the dock just as a pulse tore from the Conduit. In their berth, the Angel and the Normandy both rocked violently. 

"VEGA! CORTEZ! We need to get out of here NOW!" Kaidan tapped his earpiece. "What's our status!?" 

There was a hiss and crackle. "Come aboard the Normandy!" Vega shouted through at them. "Get moving!" 

Another pulse, and it seemed as if the Citadel itself was shaking. They scrambled down the docking tube to the Normandy, flinging themselves through the airlock. 

"Welcome aboard, Gentlemen and Lady," EDI's voice purred through the speakers. Joker and I have reached an agreement with Captain Cortez, Mister Vega and Officer Goto." She said pleasantly. 

"Need to go, now. Two pulses beginning of sequence," Mordin said briskly. "Main blast coming in...  one minute." 

"What about the Citadel?" Liara asked as they tried to find places to grab a hold. Up in the cockpit, Cortez had taken the normally empty copilot's chair and both he and Joker were interfaced with the ship. "All of the people left..." 

"Power will be directed outwards," Mordin said. "Should destroy Nazara, some damage to Citadel, nothing catastrophic." He paused. "Hopefully." 

"Enough chatter kids, this bus is leaving!" Joker shouted from the cockpit as the docking tube collapsed away. "Hold on to your hats!" 

The Normandy's freakish drive core sang as the little ship dropped away. "We're picking up a lot of turbulence," Cortez said tersely as his fingers danced in the interface. "And I'm picking up all sorts of power coming online on the Leviathan." 

"I got this," Joker snapped back. "We can just slip in between the wards right here, get ourselves..." He paused. "Oh... fuck." 

The final blast erupted from the spire as the temple came apart in a shower of glittering dust. Instead of spreading out into the Ring as it had done before, it burst forward, a single focused beam of red. 

The Normandy lurched violently as alerts sounded across the decks. The viewscreens were filled with blood-red light as the beam tore into the Leviathan. "Shockwave impact in 10... 9... 8..." EDI counted down as the pilots fought to keep the ship on her bearings. 

The blast wave hit the Normandy like a solid wall. Sparks coursed from the exposed electronics and smoke gouted from the vents. "We're getting pulled into that gate!" Joker shouted. "I can't..." 

EDI activated the fire suppression systems as the ship rolled, the artificial gravity failing. 

In the flashing dark and the smoke, Kaidan felt Shepard's fingers twine with his. 

"I love you," one of them said. And as the ship screamed, they weren't sure who said it first.


	32. Chapter 32

_I thought we were dead.  
_

_There was no reason we shouldn't have been.  
_

_But as the Normandy spun out of control, we caught the edge of the Conduit gate. I blacked out with Shepard's hand in mine, and the viewscreens before us filled with the most amazing sight I had ever seen.  
_

_The horizon of an alien world.  
_

_The next thing any of us knew, EDI was shouting at us to get up.  
_

_We staggered out of Normandy's smoke-filled airlock, stunned and aching.  
_

_We were surrounded by ruined buildings rising up to the gold-dusted night sky, overgrown with the roots of ancient trees. It was silent, except for the whisper of a gentle breeze.  
_

_I had never smelled air like this.  
_

_Liara sank to her knees in the dust, laughing and sobbing all at once. We were on a world. A world no one had seen in thousands upon thousands of years.  
_

_Then Shepard put his hand in mine and pointed up to the sky.  
_

_I squinted against the gloom to see what he was seeing with Legion's eyes. The ghostly sliver of a moon, and beyond that, small and pale and gleaming, something wondrous.  
_

_"The relay," Shepard said. "We can go anywhere from here."  
_

_In another corner of the sky, the Conduit shone like a tiny star.  
_

_One thousand, one hundred and eighty three roads in the dark to homeworlds that might not even exist anymore.  
_

_I squeezed his hand as we looked at the shapes in the sky, and breathed the unfiltered air.  
_

_We would reach out for the future that lay before us.  
_

_Together.  
_

_Always.  
_

**_END_ **

 

****

 

art by [alishatorn](http://alishatorn.tumblr.com/post/33639984404/art-masterpost-shadow-in-the-stars-based-on-and)


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